Shadow Selves
by Lauralot
Summary: Living together against both parties' will is hard, and romance is never easy. Especially when your alter egos hate each other. Eventual Wayne/Crane. Sequel to The Knight and The Prince.
1. In Medias Res

AN: Just so we're clear, this is **slash.** Or will be, eventually. If that's not your cup of tea, fine, but don't say you weren't warned. It won't be slash for a while, though, as I plan on building it up slowly.

If you haven't read the previous fics leading up to this one, I'd recommend that you at least read the one directly before this, _The Knight and The Prince_, as it sets up the opening for this fic. If you'd rather not, I have tried to fit a recap of the story into the first chapter.

The title comes from Jungian psychology, in the idea that everyone has a "shadow self" or "shadow aspect," an unconscious side made up of repressed darkness and creativity.

* * *

Thing should have been easier once the Joker left.

The Joker was, after all, the one responsible for the whole fiasco, the puppeteer pulling the strings. He was the one who'd forced Batman to bring him—along with Jonathan Crane—to the cave, under the threat of having his henchmen detonate explosives somewhere in the city. Explosives that may or may not have existed, and the knowledge that all the suffering they'd gone through might have been for nothing gave Bruce the overwhelming urge to break something—preferably the Joker's neck—every time he thought about it. Even if his actions _had _protected the city, it didn't make things much less infuriating.

And in a way, the situation was easier. Certainly, it was less stressful going to work during the day or patrolling the city at night knowing that the Joker wasn't locked up in the cave or the mansion, with the risk that he'd break out at any moment and end up attacking Alfred. It was also better for his blood pressure when he didn't have to sit through the Joker's constant lectures on how alike they were; how Batman was as much a monster as he was and it was only a matter of time before he crossed to the dark side.

Much as he knew that while the part of him that _enjoyed _beating Gotham's criminals unconscious was never far below the surface, it was his actions that defined him as monster or savior, that didn't make the Joker's words any less intoxicating. The clown was like a drug, the sort that would destroy the body beyond salvaging but provide such a high that it was nearly impossible to realize the damage being done until it was too late. That was probably why he had so many henchmen, despite his obvious insanity and reputation for ditching people whenever he felt like it. That, and the fact that most of his men were insane in the first place.

So in those respects, life had gotten easier.

In all other respects, it remained just as bad.

The Joker was a problem, of course. He always managed to be; even in Arkham, he was just a ticking bomb waiting to break out and fire acid-filled water guns at businessmen or something else equally sadistic and ridiculous. The fact that Batman and the authorities were still unable to track him down a week after his escape, even though he'd broken both legs while getting away, was just adding insult to injury. And the knowledge that the Joker knew Batman's secret identity didn't help matters in the slightest.

At least Bruce couldn't be blamed for that one. Most everything else could; believing the Joker's threat without proof and taking him back to the cave, Crane's discovery of his identity, moving the villains out of the cave and into the mansion, not keeping up on how many antipsychotics Crane had left and as such essentially allowing him to have a mental breakdown, and letting the Joker get away. But the Joker had already surmised his identity before he started all this madness, so on that one, at least, Bruce was free of guilt.

Knowing that the Joker could, at any time, reveal his secret, was somehow worse than knowing the damage the man could do to Gotham if the mood struck, and that selfishness only added to the guilt. It wasn't that he expected the Joker to reveal the truth, or even thought it likely; the Joker had made it clear on more than one occasion that he considered Batman "his," and letting the secret slip would put Bruce either behind bars or on the run. Either way, he'd be exposed, and made "human," something he knew the Joker didn't want to consider the Batman as.

Still, the man was insane. Beyond insane. There wasn't an adequate description for his mental state. Not in English, anyway. There was always the slight but incredibly real possibility that the Joker would let the truth out for no discernable reason, or in spite for "not getting enough attention" or some other mad thing.

He was never sure what he'd do, if he was exposed. During the Joker's first attacks on Gotham, turning himself in had seemed obvious. Until he'd seen, after Dent's arrests, that the Joker would continue his attacks regardless. It hadn't helped matters when he'd made himself an outcast, allowing corruption to filter back into the police force and making protecting Gotham that much more difficult. And to be honest, he _needed_ Batman. Odd, given how little time in life he'd spent as the Bat, that he couldn't imagine life without it anymore.

Not that the prospect of life on the run had much appeal. And Batman would hardly be as effective if cut off from Bruce's resources.

Even ignoring the threat of exposure, there was the massive problem that was Jonathan Crane.

Jonathan Crane, Gotham's first "super criminal." Jonathan Crane, who'd terrorized Gotham and nearly killed Rachel Dawes. Who would have driven Bruce to permanent madness as he had with so many of his patients had it not been for Lucius Fox. Who, as fate would have it, had sustained irreversible brain damage from being exposed to his own weaponized hallucinogen that caused hallucinations and constant panic without antipsychotics. So of course, he'd run out of the antipsychotics while in Bruce Wayne's captivity.

He'd heard the saying "life isn't fair," often through his own life, and he knew that despite the tragedies in his past, he had much to be grateful for. Aside from his wealth and all the opportunities it brought, he had food and clothing and a room over his head, which was more than too many people could say. And there was the fact that he'd managed as vigilante for years now without being killed or disabled.

None of that kept him from wondering why life couldn't be unfair in way that benefitted him even more than it already did. Far too often. And this was definitely one of those situations.

Keeping a villain captive was one thing, and that was trying enough. Keeping a captive who had to be kept under constant sedation while they waited for his antipsychotics to kick back in was a whole new—and unpleasant—experience. And the fact that said captive seemed to regress to behavior more typical of a small child than a dangerous criminal when sedated and unmedicated was the icing on the cake. And the icing was made of cyanide.

When Bruce began as Batman, he'd expected a number of things. The bruises and lacerations and burns and other injuries he accumulated each night, for example, or forcing the image of a social life to fend off over-curious reporters. What he had not expected was that he'd end up holding a sobbing super villain while he waited for the tranquilizers to kick back in. He doubted he could ever be prepared for such a thing. He knew hundreds of ways to knock a person unconscious, or how to trigger each and every function on the Tumbler, but never in his studies had the comforting of criminals come up.

At least he didn't have to wear the Batsuit around Crane anymore. Much as he hated having the man know his secret, he doubted the suit or voice would be anything but nightmare-inducing.

Still, a clingy, panicked villain wouldn't be so much as a problem on his own, off-putting as the situation was. Crane was certainly a danger to himself as well as Bruce and Alfred when he wasn't sedated, but under the effects of the tranquilizers, the most he could do was wander aimlessly, if he had enough strength to do some, mutter to himself, and sleep.

The fact that he wouldn't stay in that state forever, and that he knew Bruce's secret, and that Bruce didn't exactly want to keep him here indefinitely, that was the problem.

Crane, unlike the Joker, wasn't the type to keep the secret out of some twisted need to have a Batman to oppose. Bruce could see him keeping it for purposes of blackmail, perhaps, wanting to be allowed to leave Gotham without interference or carry on his "research" in the city undisturbed, but as Bruce wouldn't give into that—standing for justice ranked above even his secrecy—there was no reason why Crane wouldn't release the information out of spite, should he ever get out of the mansion. Or sell the secret to the highest bidder; he was opportunistic, as well as sadistic and dangerous.

Which made it all the more unnerving when, exactly one week after the Joker had left, Bruce woke up to find Jonathan Crane sitting by the edge of his bed, watching Bruce with the teddy bear in his arms, and looking less "mad criminal with no empathy" and more "small child who had a bad dream."

"Yes?"

"Can't sleep."

He held back a sigh as he glanced at the alarm clock. One hour since he'd finished as Batman and gone to bed. Half an hour of sleep, really, considering all the tossing and turning he'd done before blacking out. Playing nursemaid to one of the people he'd set out to stop was not what he'd had in mind when he became Batman. It hadn't been so bad right after Crane had lost it, when he'd had to be sedated into unconsciousness to keep from giving himself a heart attack through panic, but as he'd regained a bit of lucidity, Bruce had lightened the amount of sedatives, if only to reduce the risk of damaging his captive's health by overmedicating him.

Reducing the amount almost meant that Crane's body burned through it faster, however. Thankfully, the antipsychotics had built up enough in his body that he didn't immediately sob or hyperventilate after regaining a normal state of consciousness, but that didn't prevent him from wandering around or hallucinating.

Bruce sat up, reflecting that he really needed to start locking the door to the guest bedroom where Crane slept. Of course, if he did that, and Crane decided to hurt himself, the situation could get deadly very quickly. "Come here." He flipped on the lamp that sat on the nightstand, picking up an empty syringe and a bottle of some drug whose name he couldn't be bother to recall at this hour of the morning. He taken to keeping such things on hand, over the last week, as had Alfred.

"Empty."

"What?"

He lifted one hand, rubbed his temple. "It's empty. So…alone. Silence shouldn't be this deafening."

Bruce had given up trying to make sense of anything the man said a few days ago. Clear statements such as "can't sleep," "cold," or "hungry" were few and far in between among rants on emptiness or birds or anything that Crane was seeing or hallucinating at the time. He guessed that the emptiness referred to the Joker's absence, but that was the furthest he was able or cared to go into understanding. Gazing into the abyss and all that. "Come here."

Crane stared, blinking. "You…I know you."

Wonderful. He was beginning to recognize Bruce Wayne, while he was still too mad to go around without a stuffed animal security blanket. He couldn't see this going over well. "Yes. You do." He waited a moment, and upon no further reaction or movement from Crane, risked moving forward on the bed.

Luck or karma or whatever was on his side for once, as Crane didn't react. "Let me see your arm."

Wordless, he offered it. Well, that was a welcome development. Before, it would have been a struggle. It appeared that Crane was grounded enough to realize that he didn't enjoy being conscious and miserable either.

Bruce loaded the syringe with the maximum amount he could without overdoing it, injected. Crane gave the smallest of flinches. "You're all right."

He blinked again, eyes starting to cloud from the drugs. "Empty."

"So you've said. Come on." Bruce stood, bringing Crane with him. The doctor could almost walk, provided that Bruce supported him. Easier to just carry him. So he did.

The guest room was on the first floor, a distance that felt longer than it should have, likely due to fatigue. It wasn't as if Crane was heavy, especially given that he didn't eat much when he was out of touch with the world. He put him on the bed, turned to go.

"I know you."

He stopped in the doorway. "I know."

Crane stared, brows creasing in whatever thought he had. "You…your eyes glow."

He had no idea how to respond to that. "Just…try not to wander around the house, all right?"

Crane didn't answer, so after a moment, he left.

* * *

There was light filtering through the window shade, Jonathan noted upon opening his eyes, and it was blood red.

He stared for a moment, stomach clenching in anxiety. _I don't see that_, he told himself, hands clenching on the bed sheets. _I don't see that._

Of course he did, and telling himself otherwise didn't make a bit of difference. But at least he knew that he was seeing ordinary sunlight, and only imagining it to be something twisted. He considered getting up and lifting the shade to confirm it, but given his state of mind, he'd only hallucinate something hellish if he did. Likewise, he knew that the crows he saw flying around the room were imagined, as was the pain he felt when they pecked at his skin.

He didn't remember more than a few flashes of the time since that damn clown had convinced him to flush his meds in a misguided escape attempt, but he got the feeling this was the first time since losing it that he'd been lucid enough to realize that.

Jonathan glanced at the bedspread, looking past the hallucinations as best he could. These were the Batman's sheets. He was still in Wayne Manor, then. He hadn't expected the Batman to be stupid enough to return him to Arkham in such a state—especially given how his identity could be revealed so easily if he did—but he wouldn't put it past a man with judgment poor enough to think that dressing as a bat would be a good idea.

One of the crows landed on his hand, and he jerked away before he could be bit, hand brushing against something soft. _Stupid reaction. _The crow wasn't there, and even if it had pecked him, there would be no effect beyond what his mind told him there was. Not that it made things any less terrifying, but he ought to have better control than that. He tried to shrug it off, glanced down at whatever it was he'd put his hand on.

Was that—no, it couldn't be—it _had _to be another hallucination, there was just no way—

A teddy bear?

Jonathan didn't swear often, not because the baseness of such language offended him, but because he had a wide enough vocabulary that he could express himself perfectly well without resorting to vulgarities. Still, there were occasions—usually around the Joker—where obscenities were perfectly warranted as they were the only thing to adequately portray his reaction.

Thus, his immediate reaction on realizing that the bear was not his mind's fabrication was a well-deserved _What the fuck?_

* * *

Reviews of any kind are always appreciated. The next chapter will be less _Previously in the Last Fic,_ I promise.


	2. Mockery

AN: Happy Memorial Day, to those in the States!

So the chances of an update tomorrow are about a million to one, sorry. I'm working one job from 7:30 to 4, and the other from 4:15 to 10. I will try to update as soon as possible, however.

Random recommendation for a movie I watched when I should have been writing: If you can handle blood and brutal (mostly off screen) violence to people and occasionally animals, _American Psycho_. Why didn't anyone tell me that Christian Bale could play such a convincing sociopath? Or moonwalk?

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

He was going to kill the Batman.

It was a promise he'd made to himself often, one that all the villains made to themselves. Unsurprising, given that nine and a half times out of ten, it was the Batman that was responsible for their failure or capture, as opposed to the GPD or anyone else in the city. It was almost a mantra of sorts, the one point of stability and motivation. No matter how low things got, even if one was living in the sewer or working as a drug dealer, there was still a Batman that needed killing.

And Jonathan was no exception to that rule. He'd been the one to start it, in fact, aside from perhaps Ra's Al Ghul. The man had never hinted that he had a vendetta against the Batman, but being a psychiatrist—a brilliant one, to be honest—Jonathan had read him well enough to surmise that he did have some back story with the vigilante. Given the Batman's skills in ninjutsu and stealth, among other things, it was easy enough to realize that he must have at least trained with the League of Shadows at some point, if he wasn't a full member.

Adding in the knowledge of Bruce Wayne's seven year disappearance, the depth of the man's involvement with the League became very clear.

Still, there had been more to Ra's Al Ghul's relationship with the Batman than hatred, which wasn't the case where Crane was concerned. Whatever Ra's had wanted with the man, Jonathan only wanted to terrify and destroy him. Preferably as slowly as possible, though he wasn't picky. He'd even settle for the Batman's destruction at the hands of another, provided he was there to witness it. And maybe kick the body several dozen times. He'd like to think he was above such childish antics, but there were rare occasions when his emotional drives overwhelmed his dignity, and he imagined that the Batman's death would cause such a state of mind.

Method aside, he wanted the Batman dead, maybe more so than any of Gotham's other rogues. Certainly more than the Joker, who'd time and time again spoken of his perverse affection for the Bat. It was that affection that had gotten Jonathan dragged here in the first place, now that he thought about it. He would swear that the Joker would suffer for that, given all the misery he'd been through as a result, but he knew from experience the price of incurring the clown's wrath. And Jonathan had no desire to have all his ribs broken again. Or his collarbone, or fingers. Or have another concussion. And that wasn't counting all the little injuries beforehand.

He'd leave the Joker out of this, then. The Batman, however, was going to feel each and every last bit of his wrath.

He'd like to think that he wasn't consumed by revenge. At least, not usually. Most of the time there were things in his life even more pressing than destroying the Bat. Such as research, or building up immunities to each new concoction of fear toxin so his creations couldn't double back on him again. He placed that sort of thing over the Batman. Usually.

Staring down at that damn bear, however, it was hard to feel anything except an overwhelming hate for the Batman, and an overwhelming need to rip out the man's intestines and make him eat them. Or any slow, painful method of death. That caused screaming. He needed screaming. Lots of it.

How _dare _he patronize Crane like that? Like it wasn't bad enough that he'd given into the Joker's demands and brought them here in the first place, or been negligent enough to not realize that one of his captives was slowly going mad until it was too late. As if he hadn't suffered enough, the Batman had the _gall _to mock him with a stuffed animal.

_Son of a bitch._

Jonathan cast about for something to throw. He didn't have a plan formed yet beyond "hit the Bat with something heavy and incapacitating when he walks through the door" but at the moment, that was all his mind could come up with. Brilliant as he was, when he got seriously angry, the rage tended to be all-consuming. Besides, if he managed to hit him hard enough, the Batman would lie there bleeding long enough for Jonathan to develop the rest of the plan on the spot.

The search took far longer than it should have, considering that he had to force himself to look past the hallucinations to see anything as it really was. Some things he still couldn't make out, despite his efforts, and their true form had to be determined by touch. The fatigue and nausea didn't help matters. He wondered when he'd last eaten, briefly, but the mere thought of food turned his stomach even more, and he quickly dropped the idea.

Somewhere between half an hour and an hour later, he gave up. There was nothing he could throw or bludgeon with. Well, there were several such items, but they were all things like towels or pillows, and none of them would produce any sort of injury, unless he somehow gained the upper hand and strangled the Batman with the sheets or something. Even half-mad as he was now, Jonathan knew hoping for that circumstance would be fruitless. Batman had done a good job of clearing the room out, though he was loath to admit it. The only furniture in the room was the bed, which was far too heavy for him to tip over, and would require a screwdriver to dismantle. Sometime during his incapacitation, the Batman had removed the armoire and nightstand. The rest of the bedroom was empty, and there wasn't so much as a single hanger in the closet.

The bathroom proved to be equally useless. The lid to the toilet tank and the mirror were gone, and cabinets empty aside from towels and wash clothes. Even the spool for the toilet paper had been taken, on the off chance he decided to take the spring inside and stab himself with it, Jonathan guessed. He'd been hoping for a heavy bottle of shampoo or body wash or something, which would have some heft, at least, but apparently, the Batman had considered that was well, and the toiletries were all the same size as one would find in a hotel, and as such completely inadequate.

Jonathan stared at the toothbrush and wondered, for approximately one second, if he'd be to force it through the Batman's eye if he had the element of surprise. After that second, he dismissed it as ridiculous.

Even his shoes were gone. His shoes. Probably so he couldn't hang himself with the laces or bludgeon anyone with the shoes themselves. Was there nothing the man hadn't overlooked? Jonathan glared up at the opaque glass panel over the light bulb on the ceiling. Knowing the Batman, the glass was bulletproof, on the off chance that he'd decided to break that glass instead of going for the window. Not that he'd be able to reach it in the first place. The ceiling was far too high in comparison to his own height.

Not that his irritatingly small stature had stopped the Batman from giving Crane a set of Bruce Wayne's clothing. _Idiot. _As if he needed another reminder of the Bat's physical superiority. He couldn't remember much of what had gone on while he was completely mad—and currently, he was far too angry to try remembering—but judging from the bandages on his arm, he assumed he'd cut himself up. Giving him clothing that wasn't blood soaked was one thing. That, Jonathan fully approved of. Giving him clothing obviously meant for someone taller and broader, that was quite another.

He hadn't even provided a belt. Which was lucky for the Batman, because Jonathan would have whipped him across the face with it if he had. Honestly, the man had enough money that he could throw millions away on his suit and Bat-gadgets, and he couldn't be bothered to go buy something in Crane's size? Not that he particularly liked the idea of the Batman shopping for him, but it couldn't be any worse than when Harley had done the same.

Jonathan had just concluded that nothing in either room would be effective and slumped back down on the bed when he heard the doorknob turn. He grabbed the first thing within reach, knowing it wouldn't do the slightest bit of damage but being far too angry to care, and threw it with all his strength.

* * *

Given Crane's semi-lucidity last night, Bruce wasn't sure what to expect when he opened the door to the guest bedroom. He didn't have experience with mental patients, so he had no way of knowing whether last night was a fluke, or a sign of recovery. It was equally likely, as far as Bruce knew, to find Crane completely out of it or fully recovered.

Despite the ambiguity of the situation, he certainly hadn't expected to have a teddy bear thrown in his face the moment he walked through the door.

"I take it," he said, once he'd realized just what had happened, "that you're feeling more yourself?"

If looks could kill, Bruce would be dead, buried, and decomposed by now. "Why," Crane began, in a tone of pure acid, "did you think I'd need that?" He stood by the side of the bed, hands clenched so tightly that the skin had gone completely white, expression so quietly hateful that it was almost frightening.

It might have been frightening, had he not spent a good portion of the week holding the man while he sobbed, or was too sedated to stay upright on his own.

"How much of the past week do you remember, Crane?"

"Doctor."

Bruce paused. "What?"

His face went very white when he was furious. "I'm a doctor, thank you. I don't care if my license was revoked, I still earned a doctorate. And this situation is agonizing enough without a complete lack of courtesy, so if you insist on speaking to me, I'd prefer that you address me correctly."

Unbelievable. The man was a captive in the home of his hated enemy, still recovering from a psychotic episode, and he was concerned about disrespect for his title? Crane had no sense of priorities whatsoever. Bruce wasn't sure if seeing what went on in his head would be intriguing or horrific, and he wasn't in a hurry to find out. "How much of the past week do you remember, Jonathan?"

He blushed, looking stuck between shouting and trying to leave the room. "I fail to see how that's relevant."

"None of it, then?"

He only glared.

"I gave you that because you asked for it." It was too early for this. He wondered if Alfred would be willing to have this conversation in his place. Probably not. He wasn't sure what the butler's limits were, but given that he'd refused to so much as clean up after the villains, Bruce doubted he'd want to deal with an angry narcissist.

"Excuse me?"

"Not that one in particular. But you were asking for your teddy bear." Loudly and often. Bruce hadn't wanted to give him one—rightly imagining that he'd be furious when he realized just what he was holding—but he had been miserable enough that it seemed like a good idea to give him anything that would get him to stop crying.

Crane went scarlet. "I—I don't believe you."

He sighed. "Fine. Don't. You're right, I gave you a stuffed animal for my own sick enjoyment, just so I could torment you about it later. Hell, maybe I even took pictures and sent them to GCN. All while I was busy dealing with you, the criminals in the city, and Wayne Enterprises, because causing you anguish is at the top of my priorities. That's so much more reasonable than the idea that I might have wanted to treat you like a human being and give you something that would keep you from crying or asking for it every other second."

Crane looked as if he was going to shout, but then thankfully decided against it. "Where's the Joker?"

"He broke out."

"Lucky bastard." His expression spanned from anger to loneliness to a forced nonchalance, all in the space of a second.

"I take it you don't need to be sedated, then?" Aside from the rage, he seemed to have control over himself. For better or for worse.

"If only."

"Are you still hallucinating?"

Crane gave him a look of deepest loathing, but didn't respond otherwise.

"Jonathan?"

"It's bad enough," he said tersely, "for you to mock me with stuffed bears. I'd rather you didn't make fun of my mental state at the same ti—"

"I'm not making fun of you." God, he was paranoid. That, or he had a martyr complex and viewed everything as persecution. Either seemed likely. "I want to make sure that I can leave this room without sedating you, and not have you hurt yourself as a result."

"And here I thought you'd be happy if I did." He crossed his arms. "It'd get me out of your life without inconveniencing your rule, wouldn't it?"

It was an argument they'd had countless times over their encounters, and Bruce knew from experiencing that it was fruitless. Trying to convince Crane that he didn't want him dead was on par with trying to convince fish to breathe on land. It didn't matter how many times he tried; it was doomed to failure. "Are you still hallucinating?"

"Yes. All right?" His face, which had drained in anger, darkened again.

Wonderful. "Can you control it on your own?"

"Obviously."

Because he had such self-restraint at the moment. "You're sure?"

"If you ever ask me that question again, I will shove a gallon of toxin down your throat."

"I'm sure." He turned to go, then stopped in the doorway. "Are you hungry?"

"Do you care?" He caught sight of Bruce's look, quickly adding, "No, I'm not."

"You've barely eaten in a week."

"And right now, the mention of food is threatening to bring up whatever I have managed to keep down. Ask me again when the meds level out."

"When will that be?"

He shrugged. "Anywhere from later today to two more weeks."

"You should sit down."

Of course Crane would meet such an innocuous statement with such a suspicious stare. "Why?"

"Because you're still mildly drugged and slightly malnourished." Things were bad enough without Crane collapsing due to overexertion.

"I'm fine."

_You've never been fine. _He crossed the room, grabbed Crane's wrist before the doctor could stop him. "Then why is your pulse so fast?"

He tried pulling away, to no avail. "Because that's what happens when I readjust to the meds. Nausea and an accelerated heart rate. I'm fine."

"Sit down."

Either Crane was as sick of the arguing as he was, or there was a threat in his voice he hadn't meant to put there, because he did sit. His expression suggested that he'd rather jump up and wrap his hands around Bruce's throat, but he was sitting.

Bruce let him go and turned to leave again. "Let me know if you need anything."

"I'd rather do without it than accept something from you."

He rolled his eyes and continued out the door without a reply. And to think that this was what the doctor was like when he wasn't fully lucid. Things would be just fantastic when he recovered. It was at moments like these when Batman wanted to retire.


	3. Refuge in Audacity

AN: The chapter title comes from a quote from Tacitus, a Roman historian: "Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity."

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan wasn't sure if he'd ever find anyone he hated more than his great-grandmother, but he had to admit that Batman was getting very, very close to surpassing her. It wasn't that much of a stretch; the Bat had been second on the list ever since he poisoned Jonathan in the basement of Arkham. Even after the Joker had smashed all of Jonathan's ribs. Not that the injuries hadn't been horrific and Jonathan's hatred for the Joker immense, but his body had healed. As it had after his grandmother's beatings or the torment he suffered from his classmates growing up, though not without scars. But even scars began to fade over time.

The damage inflicted to his mind from exposure to the toxin, however, would not fade. Not ever. Brilliant as the human mind was—and his was more brilliant than most—it couldn't repair that sort of impairment. At best, it could find new pathways to send signals to prevent the damage from affecting its host, but the injuries would always remain. And, as he was reminded all too clearly whenever he went off the meds, his mind hadn't even found a new path.

That was, without a doubt, the worst thing anyone had ever done to him. Worse than being beaten, or drowned, or even the damn birds. Those had only been physical injuries. Not that they weren't horribly painful, but they left his mind untouched. Before the Batman had ruined everything, the fact that throughout his youth, he'd kept his sanity had been the thing he was most proud of. Even the creation of the toxin dulled in comparison, as the toxin was a direct result of his mind's intellect. Until that night in Arkham when his masterpiece had been turned against him and he'd lost the one thing he held in the highest regard, he'd been completely sane.

True, he wasn't exactly comfortable around people, or the most socially apt, and he did have the issues with birds and water, but a neurosis or two hardly qualified as a condition. And they weren't neuroses, not really. He wasn't uncomfortable around people because he was afraid of them, or because he couldn't separate those from his past with those in the present. He disliked being around others simply because he was too far above their intellectual level to be comfortable. It was like asking a high school senior to attend a fifth grade class. It was below him, and—assuming he was reading their reactions correctly—very few people seemed comfortable around him anyway. Jonathan was separate from the majority of humanity, and they sensed it as well as him. Being ill at ease in such situations hardly constituted a problem.

As for the fears, they were only natural, given his past. And a fear wasn't a phobia unless it was all-consuming. His were not, therefore, they weren't problematic.

Not that he'd ever been able to convince the Arkham staff of any of that, however. Though he'd never particularly tried. If they were idiotic enough to honestly not see the brilliance of his plans for the toxin and how they would better humanity in the long run, then there was no point in dealing with them. Amazing, really, how blind people could make themselves to something so obvious, just because it crossed their notions of humane treatment.

Anyway, all of that was irrelevant, because thanks to the Batman, he'd become truly mad. It didn't matter that with the meds, the symptoms fully disappeared and his judgment and perception weren't affected in the slightest. The fact remained that he was dependent on the pills to keep himself stable. And if sanity was conditional, it ceased to be sanity. The Batman had, in the few seconds it took to force the toxin into him, robbed him of the one thing he'd prized over all else in life.

Jonathan could never forgive him for that. Not that he wanted or planned on trying to in the first place.

Yet even after that, the Batman remained second to his great-grandmother, for reasons Jonathan himself wasn't fully sure on. It wasn't exactly that he'd been robbed of his childhood; he'd witnessed the childhoods of his peers in Georgia, and running wild, targeting the weaker kids like pack animals wasn't something he envied. It wasn't even the abuse, not fully, given that what was most important to him remained untouched. Whatever it was, maybe a combination of all the little factors, she was still the person he hated most in life, even now, so many years after her death.

_However, _Jonathan thought, glaring down at the bear the bastard hadn't even bothered to take with him, _if I'm stuck around him much longer, he might finally take her place._

It occurred to Jonathan that there had been no click of the lock, after the Batman had left. He hadn't realized it immediately due to his anger, but now he found himself staring at the door. _No…he wouldn't be that stupid. He's thick, but not _that _thick. Not when I'm lucid…_

Then again, he _had _told Jonathan to contact him if he needed anything. And assuming the door hadn't been locked while he was mad—and it probably hadn't, to make sure he was accessible should he have decided to hurt himself—it was possible for the Bat to have left it unbolted out of habit. Feeling the faintest sense of hope, Jonathan forced himself to bury the sensation as he crossed from the bed to the door. _It's not going to be open. There's no way_—

There was, apparently. Jonathan found himself staring into the hallway, stunned by his luck. Numb, he stepped into the hall, and waited for a moment or so, expecting someone to take notice and arrive.

No one did.

_There's nothing to prevent me from walking out, _he observed, too floored to do so. No, this was unbelievable—but then, Occam's razor dictated that the simplest explanation was the best, and it was easier to accept that this was a oversight on the Batman's part—he did have a habit of making stupid mistakes where his captives were concerned—than to think that this was some bizarre gambit designed to get him out of the room to no discernable gain for anyone involved.

Having decided that the Batman was simply an idiot—not that he didn't already know that—Jonathan decided to go with a straightforward method himself; walking out.

Walking toward the front door, as a matter of fact. He knew its location from the night he'd gone through the mansion searching for the laundry room. He'd considered leaving then, but at that point the Joker had been in what was essentially a vegetative state, and he'd been adamant about staying with the man until he recovered. Looking back, he realized exactly how stupid that decision had been. The Joker had proved afterward that he would throw Jonathan to the lions without so much as a glance back or a guilty feeling, so his efforts to revive the clown had been for naught, and kept him trapped here when he could have been free weeks ago.

He began his journey toward the front door at more of a run than a walk, expecting at any moment to be intercepted, be it by the Bat or his butler. Or perhaps some other employee he had yet to encounter, if there were any others. This place was so empty, it resembled a large, over-elaborate tomb more than a mansion. But despite its size, he had the feeling the Batman wouldn't keep too much of a distance from his captive at any given moment. The man made obvious mistakes, but he wasn't brainless. And this plan, Jonathan realized, of course _after _he'd begun, was ridiculous. Walking toward the front door of all things, the most obvious and central entrance to the mansion. And to think he'd been going on about the Bat's idiocy; this was every bit as bad. His prolonged exposure to such stupidity must be affecting him.

Yet time passed and he got closer to the front door, and settled down to a regular walk. He was still incredulous that he'd made it this far, but he was becoming less so. Perhaps the absurdity of the situation was the thing making this attempt possible to begin with. After all, going towards the front door was absolutely moronic. It was the most obvious part of the manor, and impossible to miss. He'd have to be a fool to try it, and since he wasn't a fool, maybe the Batman had overlooked the entrance entirely, and he'd escape by virtue of ridiculousness. It was like that fable about the boy who touched the thistle lightly, to be told by his mother that had he grabbed it full force, it wouldn't have hurt him. There was no way to do a thing like overdoing it.

His disbelief had all but faded by the time he made it to the entryway. Or foyer, or whatever it was called in a house this disgustingly large. Jonathan disliked people in general, but those who had billions to their name and spent it on mansions and Batmobiles instead of actually doing a damn to help the less fortunate…well, had he believed in hell, there'd be a special circle for such people. Not as bad as the place reserved for supposed caretakers who drove crows attack little boys, but close. Especially for the rich idiots that forced toxin into brilliant doctors.

His steps quickened again as he crossed to the door, the hope that he'd kept restrained growing and mixing with the anxiety that had been running wild. There was no way it could be this easy—but if it was, he'd be free. Gone before the Batman even noticed something amiss, hopefully. They said not to question miracles, and though Jonathan had never believed in miracles, he was beginning to come around. He reached the doors, as overlarge as everything else in the place, placed his hands on the handle, and pulled.

It was locked.

Of course it was locked. He'd been a fool to expect any different. A quick glance at the door revealed exactly what he'd guessed; that the lock was the type that required a key. Wonderful. No wonder they hadn't kept a closer watch; they'd already anticipated it. Damn Bat and his always prepared-ness. He was like some sort of Boy Scout gone wrong. Hope fading as quickly as it had grown, Jonathan removed his hands. There could still be another way out, some neglected route. He turned to search before it was too late.

And found himself face to face with the Batman, or Bruce Wayne, or whatever the hell he was supposed to think of him as without the mask and suit. _Lovely._

"Did you honestly expect that to work?"

His voice wasn't angry, as Crane had expected, but a mix of amusement and what seemed to be pity. Both tones made Crane want to take the glass of water the Batman was carrying for no apparent reason, pour it in the billionaire's face, and then smash the glass over his head and grind the slivers into his eyes. "It's better to have tried and failed than never tried at all."

The Bat only shook his head, held out the glass. "Here."

"Not thirsty." Not that he would take it even if he was. What did the man hope to accomplish? It wasn't as if playing at being concerned would make Crane enjoy being here. Or make him complacent.

"Well, I didn't know if you could dry-swallow pills or not." He put the glass into Crane's hand, pulling out the bottle of antipsychotics from his pocket. He popped off the childproof cap, shaking two of the pills into his hand. Crane couldn't decide if the Batman acting the role of the nurse was infuriating or unsettling. "Here."

If he didn't need them so desperately, he would have thrown them back in the Bat's face. Instead, he took them with the water, glaring all the while. "Give me that." Off the Batman's stare, he tilted his head toward the prescription bottle. "It'd be less work on you." _And less humiliating on my part._

"No."

"Why not?" The urge to shatter the glass on Batman's head became overwhelming.

"Because the last time you were responsible for your medication, you didn't tell me when you ran out." The bottle disappeared back into his pocket. "That's not something I want to go through again."

It took all of Crane's self control to keep his jaw from dropping. _Unbelievable. _The Batman of all people, nicknamed "The World's Greatest Detective" by reporters, and he thought that Crane had run out of the meds without telling him? That Crane had willingly put himself through that? He hadn't realized that the Joker had gotten rid of them in an attempt to gain freedom by returning to Arkham? True, Crane couldn't exactly remember how the clown had broken the news of his insanity, but the Joker was hardly subtle. _God, he's dense. If he got any denser, he'd be a neuron star._

"Jonathan?"

Hearing that bastard try and address him on a first name basis broke his disbelief. "How difficult could it possibly be for you to count out the number of days those will last and then give them to me?"

"And if you decide to overdose so you can get out of here and to a hospital?"

It was amazing how close he came to the Joker's plan without realizing it. If a tack was sharp, the Batman was the thing furthest from it. There ought to be laws against cluelessness so severe. "Because jeopardizing my health is such an appealing prospect."

"You've starved yourself before."

"I was under emotional duress," Crane informed him, through clenched teeth.

"And you're not now?"

Oh, how _dare _he assume he had any insight as to what went on in Crane's mind? What gave some rich bastard who used his parents' deaths as an excuse to run around the city being irresponsible with high-tech toys the right to believe he had any understanding of the people he fought? Crane had never wanted to kill anyone more in his life, and never before had he such creative ideas on how to do so. "You don't know the first thing about me."

The Batman opened his mouth to say something, stopped, started again. "Come on."

"Where?"

"Back to the guest room."

Guest room. As if calling it that made it better than what it was: a cell. A nice cell, but a cage was a cage no matter how it was dressed up. Crane glanced toward the windows. No, breaking through one of them would severely cut and possibly concuss him, and besides, the Batman was a faster runner.

"The glass is reinforced," the Batman said, following Crane's line of sight. "You couldn't break it if you tried."

He glared. "Would you like me to test that?"

"If you run, I will catch you, carry you back to the room, lock the door, and put a house arrest anklet on you as soon as I get my hands on one. Still want to test it?" There was more amusement than pity in his voice now.

"When I get out of here, I'm going to kill you."

"You're not exactly one of my favorite people either." The Batman reached out, and Crane flinched involuntarily. He only took the glass from the doctor's hand. "Are you going to walk or do I have to drag you?"

Crane glared, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and started forward with the most dignity he could manage in the situation. Which wasn't much.

"You're sure you don't need anything?"

"I believe I said I'd rather do without than ask you, didn't I?"

He felt a hand on his shoulder and froze beneath it as the Bat force him to turn. He found those dark eyes boring into his, expression unreadable. "Look. You don't want to be here. I don't want you here. But until I figure out what to do with you, you're stuck here. So you might as well make the best of it and stop trying to play the martyr."

He found his voice. "And you might want to stop projecting onto me. Wanting to avoid contact with the man who ruined my life is hardly playing the persecution card, Batman."

"You ruined your own life when you chose to torture people."

"It worked out perfectly until _you _showed up."

He sighed, moved his hand to take Crane's wrist, and pulled him forward. "I'm not getting into this with you. Come on."

Crane stopped, fully realizing that if the Batman chose to keep moving, his arm could be pulled from its socket, but hating the contact too much to care. "Let go."

"Move, Jonathan."

"Let _go._"

He glanced over his shoulder at Crane, expression showing that hint of pity again. Bastard. "If I let go, you had better walk, or I'll end up carrying you next time."

"I was walking _before _you grabbed me," he snapped, pulling his arm free as the Bat's grip loosened.

"Whatever."

Crane walked behind him, inwardly fuming. It was bad enough to imprison him, but to have the gall to first imply that he understood anything about Jonathan, and then to _touch _him? The Batman was dead. He was beyond dead, and when he got free, the Scarecrow was going to show that arrogant little rich boy exactly what—

The Scarecrow. Crane almost stopped moving again. In all the madness of the morning, he'd forgotten Scarecrow. His other half, who'd left when he agreed to the Joker's plan, saying he'd return when it was over.

Upon reflection, Jonathan realized he'd only said that he _might_ return.

And he hadn't, and Jonathan was stuck alone with the Bat.

* * *

A neuron star is so dense than a spoonful of its surface would weigh around a hundred million tons.


	4. Alone

AN: Apologies for the lateness of this update. For whatever reason I've felt incredibly lethargic over the past two days, and my stomach deciding that it hated me and threatening to reenact the chestburster scene from _Alien _on Thursday night didn't help.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Alone.

He could force himself to keep walking after that revelation, but only just. There was a definite falter to his steps, but he was too lost in his own thoughts to register if the Batman noticed or cared. His _own _thoughts. Just his, and not Scarecrow's. How could he not have noticed this before? It was like waking up to find he was missing an arm or leg, and not noticing until a few hours later. Only infinitely worse.

_Scarecrow?_

He was met with silence. Agonizingly empty silence. If this had been happening to someone else, he might have found it humorous, or at least sadly ironic. In any other circumstance, silence would be a welcome thing. Jonathan Crane had, with few exceptions, never liked people, as they rarely liked him in return. As such, he viewed human interaction such as conversation to be little more than a necessary evil as a doctor and little more than torture as a patient. If he was in charge of things, there would also be a special circle of hell for incompetent psychiatrists. He'd never realized exactly how much he hated his coworkers until he was the one being interrogated by them.

It had been his belief for some time now that if hell existed, it existed on Earth in the form of other people. Thus, never hearing from someone again should be, with few exceptions, a welcome development. But there was no greater exception to that than the Scarecrow.

The hallucinations, which he'd been able to ignore for the most part in his escape attempt—anger worked wonders for his mental health, apparently—seemed to get worse. Intellectually, he knew they weren't real and they only appeared more vivid at the moment because of his panic, but that didn't make them any less horrifying. He did stop moving now, unable to notice or care if he'd attracted the Batman's attention, heart hammering in fear.

The hallucinations were one thing. The hallucinations, he could handle. They weren't real, despite their look of legitimacy. And while that didn't make them less frightening, it did give him the knowledge that they'd be gone once the meds fully kicked in, and that could keep him going. He had no such reassurance where Scarecrow was concerned, however, and therefore he was terrified. The silence…it was more than just quiet. The feeling wasn't the sensation he felt when Scarecrow was simply not talking, or sleeping, infrequently as he did that. It wasn't just silent. It was empty.

As if Scarecrow had been able to disconnect the area of Jonathan's mind that he inhabited completely. It wasn't a lack of response so much as the sensation that his words weren't reaching his other half at all, unable to pass the barrier Scarecrow had enclosed himself in. Somewhere beneath his fear, Jonathan registered that that shouldn't be possible. For all their differences, Scarecrow was, at the core, a part of himself.

He wasn't, as the idiots at Arkham would surely classify him, if they knew of his existence, a split personality. Had he been that, Jonathan would be completely unaware of both Scarecrow and his actions. Not to mention that the odds of having just one other personality were completely ridiculous, outside of books and movies. Those with dissociative identity disorder had an average of ten or so personalities, sometimes ranging as low as two or sometimes over a hundred, but the extremes were incredibly rare, rarer even than the disorder itself. Besides, the prevailing theory maintained that multiple personalities were created as coping mechanisms to a severe trauma, and if that was the case, Jonathan would have no memory of his childhood torments, as Scarecrow would have been the one to suffer through them.

Given that Jonathan's miserable and entirely clear memories of his past, that was obviously not the case.

No, Scarecrow wasn't another personality, or an imaginary friend, or a coping mechanism. He hadn't been created in response to trauma or loneliness or any of the other torments Jonathan had gone through; he'd always been there. As far as Jonathan could recall, at least, and he had memories dating back to age three or so. He'd never been without Scarecrow. That wasn't to say that his relationship with his other half had always been what it was now, but there had always been a relationship, because there'd never been a time without his alter ego.

In his childhood, Scarecrow had been nearly as he was now, a voice to his other half. He hadn't been his own person in that time period, however, and if Jonathan stopped to consider it—which he'd rarely wanted to do as a child—he'd be forced to admit that Scarecrow seemed more an imaginary friend than a separate entity at times. As a teenager, the conversations had stopped for the most part, Scarecrow sinking back to little more than a running commentary on Jonathan's life, which was nonetheless constant and comforting during his most awkward years of social exclusion.

For whatever reason, Scarecrow had all but disappeared during the years of college before he became a grad student. Why that was, Jonathan had never been sure. Certainly he hadn't become a social butterfly during that time—nor had he wanted to—but unlike in high school, others seemed just as willing to leave him alone as he was to avoid them. He imagined his alter ego's silence was due to the fact that he'd always provided comfort to Jonathan, and without suffering, there was little comfort needed. Whatever the reason, once Jonathan became a grad student and had to spend time in close proximity with people he couldn't stand all day, Scarecrow's taciturn behavior faded as abruptly as it began, and he was back to the constant commentary and occasional conversation, which lasted until the Batman force-fed them fear toxin in the basement of Arkham.

That was the first time Scarecrow had taken over. That was the first time he'd seemed to have his own consciousness, to have grown beyond Jonathan's name for himself when he had a burlap mask over his head. Whether this huge leap in development was due to the toxin itself, or as Scarecrow's way of protecting him against the combined terror of the Batman and the drugs' effects was anyone's guess.

Bizarrely, given how much Scarecrow's absence tormented him now, he hadn't liked his other half at all for some time after that shift. He'd told Harley as much in their sessions together. It was _his _mind, and he didn't want to lose control of it, even to a part of himself. It wasn't until he began spending prolonged—and forced—time around the Joker that he realized the advantage of having another person to talk to that wasn't sadistic and irreverent. Well, he was irreverent, but in a way that didn't make Jonathan want to deafen himself. Usually.

And now he was gone.

Not even "empty" began to describe it. Soulless, maybe. Without hope. The most Jonathan felt was numbness, somehow mixing with panic. _He said he'd come back, I'm normal again—close to normal—why isn't he here—oh God, I can't do this alone, I can't be _here _without him, what if he's really left this time—I can't be alone again, I don't know how to be alone, please come back, please come back_, please_._

There was only silence in return. Jonathan's vision swam in and out of focus for a minute, making the crows and other hallucinations all the more horrible, legs threatening to give out beneath him. His stomach twisted, the possibility of being sick on himself growing more likely by the second.

There was a hand on his forehead, calloused and warm and just unexpected enough to snap him out of it.

He jerked away, glaring at the Batman. "What ar—" He caught himself, decided he'd rather not divulge that he'd just panicked enough to stop registering the events of the world around him. "I don't recall giving you permission to touch me."

"What's wrong with you?"

"What difference does it make?" Crane tried brushing past him, only to have a hand close around his wrist. It wasn't painful, but the grip was strong enough to keep him in place. He felt his teeth clench involuntarily. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Trying to figure out if you're having another psychotic episode." Batman looked more resigned than anything else, as if he wanted nothing more than to go back to bed. For once in his life, Crane agreed on that point. What he wanted, more than anything, was Scarecrow back, but miserable as he was at the moment, he'd settle for cowering under a blanket and trying to pretend the rest of the world wasn't there. But there was another look in the Batman's eyes, something like concern or pity, and that made Crane's blood boil.

"I'm not." He tried pulling away, knowing it was futile. "Now that that's cleared up, why don't you just throw me back into my cell and we can call it a da—"

"You stopped responding to everything around you for the better part of five minutes. That's not normal."

_No, really?_ "Normal's a relative term. If you're worried that I'll try killing myself and end up bleeding all over your things, let me remind you that the antipsychotics have taken effect, and you're rich enough to afford carpet cleaners if I did manage to—"

"Jonathan." The Bat's other hand grabbed his shoulder, turned him so they were facing each other. Crane had never wanted to spit in someone's face so badly in his life, and considering his life, that was saying something. "I'm trying to make sure you're not a danger to yourself, all right? What happened?"

"Don't do that."

"What?"

_Exist. _"Act as if we're on a first name basis. If you're not going to call me by my proper title, I'd prefer that you didn't address me by name at all."

Beneath his calm exterior, Crane saw a distinct flash of frustration in the Batman's eyes, an indication that he'd have been slapped if not for the man's self control. So the concern was an act. Of course. As if a man who beat criminals senseless night after night would really care about his captive. "I'm not letting go until you tell me what's going on."

"I was thinking. Think. Ing. If you know what that means. I imagine it's a foreign concept to you, but it's not uncommon."

"And you were thinking hard enough that you stopped watching where you were walking, ran into me, and just stood there shaking while I tried to get your attention." He could make his voice bitingly flat, when he was so inclined. Crane was almost impressed. "Is that it?"

"Yes."

He sighed. Had the situation not been so miserable, Crane imagined he would have taken great delight in ruining the Batman's day like this. "Are you hungry?"

"You realize, don't you, that if I was starving enough to stop responding to the world around me, I'd have either fainted or gone into a coma?"

That frustrated look again. Crane found himself wishing that he _would _be hit. Maybe Bat-violence would be enough to bring Scarecrow back. "Do you need food?"

The idea of eating in these circumstances made bile rise in his throat again. "Not unless you want me to be sick all over your nice floors."

"Then what's wrong?"

"I'm _tired._" Knowing it would be fruitless to try pulling free again, he tried shoving the Batman with his free hand. It was every bit as ineffectual as he'd expected, and then some.

"So what, you fell asleep while walking?" Damn the pity in his voice. It was clearly recognizable; not as strong as the disbelief or irritation that followed it, but still infuriating.

"Sure, why not?"

"I'm trying to help you." The Bat's grip tightened, shaking him slightly. It seemed to have been done out of exasperation, not intent to cause harm. Which made it all the more enraging. "And I can't do that if you don't tell me what's wrong."

"I already have. And I believe I've made perfectly clear my feelings towards getting help from you."

Another sigh, and then one hand was off his shoulder, the other on his wrist dragging him forward. "Fine." He was half-led, half-dragged down the hall, in a welcome silence that ended only when the Batman released him once they'd reached the guest room. "You don't like me. It's mutual. But I don't want you to get hurt. So tell me if you need something."

He'd closed the door before Crane could come up with a suitably sarcastic remark.

Jonathan closed his eyes against the onslaught of crows, telling himself he didn't feel the pain they inflicted. _Scarecrow?_

There was only silence.

_I—I'm sorry I didn't listen to you before. You were right. Please—I need you now. I won't question you again if you come back. Please. I miss you._

Nothing.

He felt himself sink to the floor, tears that had been stinging his eyes since the realization that his other half had abandoned him finally spilling over.

* * *

Jonathan's line about "thinking—if you know what that means" comes from the Winnie-the-Pooh story _In Which Pooh Invents a New Game, and Eeyore Joins In_. It's one of Eeyore's lines: "Somebody BOUNCED me. I was just thinking by the side of the river—thinking, if any of you know what that means—when I received a loud BOUNCE." Yeah. Winnie-the Pooh and Batman have sort of been inexplicably tied in my head ever since I realized that the noises the Joker makes in the hostage video tape when he's waving the Bat mask around sound a lot like Tigger's laugh. I'm messed up.

As for Jonathan's mental condition, I'm really not sure what Scarecrow is. I don't see him as a split personality, more like a weird coping mechanism. Like a role play that goes on for so long, the person can't stop doing it anymore, or something like the syndrome of subjective doubles, in which a person believes he or she has a doppelganger who looks the same but has a different personality.


	5. Bright Side

AN: Sorry about the delayed updates as of late. For whatever reason, my brain has not been functioning at its normal levels of functioning-ness. I don't care that that's not a word, it's how I speak. I'm also one of those people who say "dude" frequently and I draw it out when I say it, so yeah. I'm stunningly ineloquent—and occasionally inarticulate— in casual conversation.

This chapter heavily references one of my previous fics, _The Accidental Therapist,_ in which Jonathan attempts suicide after various torments from the Joker, and tries to starve himself when that fails. The starving falls through as well, as he's just fed through nasogastric tubing.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Banging one's head against the wall—or the refrigerator, in this case—might be a terrible way to relieve stress, but Bruce found that he really didn't care at the moment. It wasn't as if he was hitting his head hard enough to see stars, hear ringing, or lose consciousness, so he couldn't be doing that much damage. Probably. It didn't really hurt. He wasn't experiencing the fuzziness the Joker had mentioned in conjecture with head trauma, but even without disorientation, it was more of an irritation than anything else. He wasn't doing it to inflict pain, anyway.

Besides, given that his other method of dealing with stress was to dress up like a Bat and stop crime illegally, this was downright healthy in comparison.

"Master Wayne?" Alfred's voice held both amusement and concern, though the amusement was more prevalent. "May I ask what you're doing?"

"Burning a hundred and fifty calories an hour."

"Just once," the butler began, stepping around Bruce to reach the cabinet, "I'd like to be able to get a cup of tea without happening across some sort of small madness."

"Such as?"

"Clowns dying their hair in the sink, to start. That'd be the most striking, though seeing you concuss yourself is close. You might want to consider a hobby, sir."

He heard Alfred turn on the faucet; the running water somehow complimented the rhythm of his head making contact with the refrigerator. "I have hobbies."

"One that you actually enjoy." The faucet switched off, leaving a dripping that was completely at odds with the banging.

"Don't have time."

A hand took the collar of his shirt, gently, and pulled backward. He could have resisted, but he didn't, and let himself be moved back. "You ought to think about taking a day off."

It was one of the few issues on which they'd never compromised, though it wasn't something they argued about. Bruce ran himself ragged until exhaustion, injury, illness, or horrific weather conditions forced him to stay in for the night, despite his butler's disapproval. He suspected Alfred didn't press the issue because he understood how great Bruce's need to fight as he did was. It was the same sort of drive that kept Alfred here day after day, when any other sensible British veteran would have washed his hands of the whole thing and left years ago.

Whatever the reason behind Alfred's reluctant acceptance of his choices, Bruce appreciated it. "You should think about it yourself. You know, get away from all the madness."

"With all due respect, sir, you may be skilled at keeping Gotham under control, but you're a bit lacking as far as Wayne Manor is concerned. The time you burned the house down, for example, or—"

"That was—"

"—any of the catastrophes that have occurred when I've left the house recently."

All right, so the last time Alfred had left, Crane had chosen that moment to have a mental breakdown, and the time before that, his secret had been exposed. Still. Alfred wasn't literally the lynchpin to the manor's stability, much as the place depended on him. Bruce was willing to accept a number of things as far as his worldview was concerned, but the supernatural wasn't one of them. Not yet. "So it seems we're at an impasse."

"Apparently so." He was watching the tea kettle, which had yet to so much as steam. They said a watched pot never boiled, but they'd clearly never seen on of Alfred's disapproving stares. Were he to give one now, Bruce had little doubt that the water would be boiled, the tea steeped, and the concoction poured in under a minute. It was that effective. Maybe he should set Alfred after the Joker one of these days.

"Is there a reason why you chose the refrigerator as the target of your aggression, when there's such a perfectly good expanse of wall to abuse?"

"I doubted you'd appreciate it if I put my head through the dry wall."

"I doubt your head's _that _thick." He considered it. "Close enough, I suppose."

Bruce tried to remember exactly what he'd been in the kitchen for in the first place, and drew a blank. Either he was far more annoyed than he realized, or he'd been hitting his head a bit too hard after all. "I think I came in here for food. And then became distracted."

"Obviously. Sit."

He did so without question as Alfred opening the long-suffering refrigerator and began searching inside.

"You can't let the situation affect you so much, Master Wayne."

He rested his head on the table, resisting the urge to slam it against that as well. "I've got one of my worst enemies living in my house, and he knows my identity."

"Well, at least he hasn't broken out and told the world. Do try to be positive, sir."

"This coming from the most cynical man I know."

"It's not cynicism if it's accurate. Will your guest be needing anything?"

"I think he said he'd rather do without than accept something from me."

"Then he'll become weak and complacent from malnourishment and become far easier to deal with," Alfred said, pulling a frying pan from the hook on the wall. "You have to look on the bright side of things, Master Wayne."

* * *

If there was one thing about the Batman's mansion that he had to grudgingly respect, it was the cleanliness. Take, for example, the space beneath the bed and the floor. Most people neglected that space, and let the dust accumulate. The majority of those who didn't tended to shove things there as an alternative to cleaning. In the case of this guest room, however, the person who cleaned it—he assumed it was the Batman's butler—seemed to actually move the bed and vacuum beneath it, despite the bed's size.

Or maybe there was another method of cleaning under it. Whatever it was, Jonathan was able to lie beneath it without having a coughing fit or being covered in filth.

Why he was under the bed, Jonathan wasn't entirely sure. It had seemed perfectly rational at the time he'd decided to do it, several minutes ago, but given that he'd been in the middle of a moderate panic attack that was only just beginning to fade, that wasn't saying much. Whatever the reason had been, he had to credit himself for having good ideas even in the rare times that he wasn't rational, as it had helped, if only slightly.

Perhaps it was the dark. There was a reason the isolation rooms in Arkham kept the lights off. Unless one was afraid of it—and being locked in a closet one too many times as a child had thoroughly cured Jonathan of his own fear of darkness—there was something calming about it. The lack of vision prevented overstimulation to an already tense system, maybe. Though the hallucinations remained. Or it could have been the enclosed space. He'd never been claustrophobic either. Being unable to move around much helped him focus as opposed to panicking and crying or tearing at himself. Aside from horseback riding, he'd never been fond of open space. It was the reason that he didn't mind straitjackets, provided he wasn't in them long enough to cause pain.

Whatever the reason, he'd stopped crying, thankfully. Not that he'd cried much, or loudly, but he still didn't want visible evidence of that loss of control. If he had to see that pity, or mockery, or whatever it was in the Batman's eyes again, he'd go mad. Besides, the fact that he'd given up control was what had caused Scarecrow to leave in the first place, so the inability to master his emotions now would hardly help to persuade his other half to return.

If he'd ever return.

Jonathan felt his eyes sting at the thought and willed himself not to blink until the excess moisture dried. He had to come back. He'd come back the last time he left, when he'd gone to avoid the beating the Joker had put Jonathan through, after warning Jonathan not to antagonize the clown. He should have listened. It would have spared him so much pain, as it would have if he'd listened the last time Scarecrow told him off.

And maybe, if he'd listened then, Scarecrow wouldn't have been so angry about the last time. And he might have stayed.

Besides, the last time he'd left, it hadn't felt like this. He'd felt cut off, yes, but there was also a sense of someone behind the barrier Scarecrow had put between them. It was like seeing a person through a glass shower door; too distorted to get a clear view, and the water loud enough to cancel out attempts at speech, but at least there was the comfort in knowing his friend hadn't gone forever.

There was no such comfort now. And it wasn't glass any longer, it was carbon steel, and three feet thick. There was no way of knowing if Scarecrow remained, and no way of making contact, unless Scarecrow decided to come back.

He felt bile rise in his throat as he considered that. An accomplishment, considering that he'd hardly eaten in days, and his hunger was starting to become painful, in spite of the nausea. He fought off thoughts of both food and abandonment, and considered his options.

The last time, Scarecrow had come back after he'd tried to kill himself. No, not directly after that. He'd begun to starve first. It wasn't until after the Arkham staff had begun tube feeding him that Scarecrow had come back. He still shuddered at the memory of that experience. They said that it wasn't supposed to hurt, and maybe it wouldn't have if he'd relaxed or the tube hadn't been slightly too large, but it wasn't something that he ever wanted to repeat, even under sedation. The sensation of having anything shoved down his throat or nasal cavities brought up the memories of drowning—it certainly hadn't helped when he'd gagged and the nurses had forced water between his resisting lips—and the experience of having a tube pushed into his nose and down his throat, followed by air being injected in and stomach acid being drawn out—both to ensure they hadn't put it in the lung by mistake—could hardly be considered pleasant, even if it hadn't hurt. Which it had.

He wasn't sure which of those three had brought Scarecrow back. The options appeared to be threat of death, starvation, and torture. He supposed he could go through and test each of those, but he wasn't sure his body could handle starving that way again without doing permanent harm, especially after the stress it had been through as of late. Threat of death was still possible, given that the last time he'd attempted suicide, he'd been able to open his wrists with what little remained of his nails, thanks to hours of perseverance. But Scarecrow would realize that he wasn't actually trying to kill himself. A mock suicide attempt wasn't likely to win him any favors.

So torture, then? It wasn't as if he had any nurses to inflict agony on him by trying to help. What was he supposed to do, harass the Bat until he was beaten within in an inch of his life? Scarecrow had already shown that he'd leave if the threat of being hurt badly enough was imminent, so that form of torture wasn't going to accomplish anything. And hurting himself would be the same as a suicide attempt.

Maybe he was approaching this from the wrong direction. After all, the circumstances of the desertion the last time were entirely different than they were now. Previously, he'd left to avoid pain. This time, he'd left because Jonathan had gone against him. Whatever the catalyst in Scarecrow's return had been last time, the gain seemed to have been preventing further severe damage to the body.

Given that he wasn't in life-threatening danger, there was no reason to assume that suffering would bring Scarecrow back. He'd need another incentive. And now he had to discover exactly what that incentive would be.

At the moment, however, he decided his best course of action would be to keep from exhausting what little energy he had left after the madness. There would be no point in wasting all of his energy to find that trigger only to collapse from fatigue before he could implement it.

Sleeping was not something that came easily to Jonathan. Even less so when he was distraught and hallucinating. But he did lose consciousness eventually, albeit it at least an hour later.

* * *

It seemed every time Bruce expected something regarding a villain, he was proven spectacularly wrong. He'd expected that Crane wouldn't provide much of a threat, and been poisoned and set on fire. He'd expected that the mob would be harder to take down than the Joker, and paid for that underestimation dearly. He'd thought that his secret identity was safe, and the Joker had blown that out of the water. And on and on, _ad nauseam. _At this point, he really ought to stop expecting things. They only proved him wrong in the worst way possible.

Still, he hadn't expected to find Jonathan Crane asleep under the bed when he went to see if he wanted lunch. It was odd, after all that had happened, that something as minor as that would surprise him, but it did.

He supposed that it wasn't as if Crane didn't have a precedence of this sort of thing. Hiding under the table a few days before, and under his sink when they'd been in his apartment. Come to think of it, he'd disappeared briefly under the bed there as well, though only to retrieve a weapon. So hiding under things wasn't a new development.

Bruce hadn't expected him to sleep on the floor, however. He seemed far too dignified for that sort of thing.

Well, it was odd, but at least it wasn't an escape attempt, as he'd first thought upon opening the door to find the room seemingly empty. Thank heaven for small favors, terrible as the situation remained. He stared at Crane, trying to decide whether it would be best to move him back onto the bed or to let sleep lunatics lie. On the one hand, every moment Crane slept was a moment he wasn't plotting an escape or being an annoyance. One the other, the man tended to toss and turn violently in his sleep—odd, considering that the body was supposed to be paralyzed, at least in the REM stage—and if he did so in such a small space, it could easily lead to injury.

He begged whatever deity was listening to keep the ex-psychiatrist unconscious, and reached beneath the bed, taking Crane into his arms. He didn't stir, not when he was dragged from beneath the bed, and not when he was lifted and put down on the sheets. _Maybe it's a sign that things will get better._

…_Yeah, right._

* * *

AN: It's said that banging your head against the wall burns 150 calories an hour. No idea if that's true.

They say nasogastric tubing isn't that painful to have put in, and I've seen videos on Youtube of people nonchalantly having it placed, but I imagine it would hurt if you resisted, and feel very strange even if you didn't.

The body does paralyze in REM sleep, to keep people from hurting themselves acting out dreams. I believe sleep paralysis is what occurs when you wake up in the paralyzed stage, though I could be wrong.


	6. Breakfast

AN: So I've noticed that as of late, I've developed the habit of listening to odd or creepy music right before I write. Given that my writing, under the snark, can get very dark, that's not so surprising, but I can't help but find it odd that the bizarre music I listen to is completely unrelated in theme to anything I write. Well, I've always been strange.

The good news is I think my brain is working again. The bad news is that tomorrow is another of those days where I'm working eight in the morning to ten at night.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan felt the bed below him before he registered the hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and in the moment before he was brought back to full consciousness, tried to work out where he was. For a few seconds, his mind was lost in recollection of the dream he'd been having. He remembered almost none of it now, but it seemed to have involved a lot of darkness and fog and a fruitless search for something. He hardly needed a doctorate to know exactly what that signified. As the dream faded further into obscurity, he turned his attention to the surface he was lying on. He was fairly certain that he'd fallen asleep on the floor, but this felt like a mattress.

It also felt soft, which ruled out being back at Arkham. Those cots were about as comfortable to lie as the floor itself, and nearly as cold as the floor tiles to boot. Unless the Batman had somehow bribed the Arkham staff into giving Jonathan better furnishings, as if that would keep him from breaking out and blackmailing Bruce Wayne for everything he could possibly gain. But he doubted the Bat would be that stupid, so he assumed he'd just been put back on the bed. If he'd been a little more conscious, Jonathan expected that would have angered him greatly, but at the moment, he was content to be lying there comfortably.

Until the hand on his shoulder shook him again, gently, and he opened his eyes.

The Batman. Of course. Fighting back the urge to shout, he sat up, shoving the man's hand off. "Do you have no concept of personal space, or do you just not care?"

He rolled his eyes. Crane suddenly understood the Joker's love of ripping people's eyeballs from their sockets or otherwise damaging them. "How would you prefer that I wake you; dump a bucket of water over your head?"

The question was rhetorical, and sarcastic as well, but it didn't keep Crane from tensing at the thought, a chill going through him. "Here's a thought; why don't you respect my desire to have no physical contact with you and just _say _something if you need to torment me that badly?"

Another roll of the eyes. Crane was rather tempted to try that "toothbrush through the socket" idea from yesterday. "I did. It didn't take."

So Crane's physical body hated the Bat as much as his mental self. Interesting. "If you insist on coming in and disrupting me, you could at least have the courtesy to explain why you're here."

What gave that spoiled playboy the right to look so exasperated, so put upon? He wasn't the one being held prisoner. Honestly, if their conversations were so uncomfortable to him, he ought to stop having them. But that would deprive him of a weaker person to push around, something he undoubtedly enjoyed. Bastard. "You need to eat."

"No, thank you." God. Back to the false concern, it seemed. If he'd be a mad vigilante keeping one of his enemies captive, he'd have hooked said enemy up to an IV a week ago. Certainly it would be less painful than this idiocy.

"It wasn't a request."

It was Crane's turn to roll his eyes. How clichéd could the Batman's attempts at intimidation get? "What are you going to do, shove food down my throat?"

He didn't answer. Crane, having been force-fed once—and once was more than enough—got the feeling that provoking him might not be the best idea. Of course, sensing there was danger and actually acting to avoid it were two very different things, and he wasn't particularly skilled at either. "Get up."

Oh, that tore it. If there was one thing that threw each and every one of his sensibilities out the window, it was being ordered around and spoken down to. He'd gotten enough of that when he was young and couldn't fight back; he wasn't about to take it now that he could, albeit badly. "I think I'm fine here, actually."

"Jonathan—"

He was every bit as surprised as the Batman looked to find that he actually growled at that one. It hadn't been intentional. Clenching his hands against the sheets, he inhaled deeply, trying to regain control. He wasn't sure if it was the loss of Scarecrow or the situation itself that was causing these slips, but he didn't like it at all.

The Batman stared for a moment, shook his head faintly, continued. "You know I can make you get up if I have to. You might as well just do it yourself. There's nothing to gain from resisting."

True, but letting the man he hated so fervently order him around would certainly cost him his dignity. And that was unthinkable. "I disagree."

"Up."

What did he think Crane was, a dog? "I'm not moving, and you couldn't make me if you tri—"

The Batman's hands were on him before he could finish, and one blur of motion later, he was being carried. He felt his cheeks burning, his humiliation not at all helped by the knowledge that the cry he'd made when he was lifted had been less of an intimidating shout of rage and more of a yelp of shock. It seemed that no matter how often something like this happened, he never realized he was going to fail miserably again until it was too late. "_Put me down._"

"Are you going to walk?"

He kicked as hard as he could, feet connecting with the Batman's side with an incredibly satisfying thunk. Given that Crane was barefoot, it wouldn't cause much injury, but without the Kevlar armor, it should at least sting a bit. He was willing to accept small victories at the moment. "Let go."

"Fine." There was another blur of motion, and he found himself standing in the hallway outside of the guest room. This was one of those occasions where it would have been wise to admit defeat and allow himself to be led, but the humiliation of being carried and, more importantly, forced, had overpowered Crane's sense of self-preservation and his immediate, unthinking response was to dive at the man, wanting nothing more than to rip his skin off.

The Batman's larger and considerably more powerful hands closed around his own before he made contact. "Behave."

"I hate you so much."

"That's nice." One of his wrists was released, though the Batman kept his hold on the other as he pulled Crane forward. "Come on."

At that point, all of Crane's higher brain functions became immediately and feverishly dedicated to deciding the slowest and most painful method he should use to kill the Batman, when he finally got out of here. As such, he was essentially dead to the world around him, and allowed himself to be dragged. When his observational skills kicked back in, he found himself in the manor's kitchen, in front of the table.

"Sit."

"Would it kill you to ask politely?"

There was no response. At least he hadn't been shoved down, for once. He'd regained enough control over his emotions to decide that he didn't want to be humiliated again, and as such, he sat.

"Thank you."

Wonderful. They'd progressed from physical mockery to its verbal cousin. What a development that was. He said nothing in response, only rolled back the sleeves of the Batman's overlarge shirt so that his hands were free again. As if the situation wasn't miserable enough without ill-fitting clothes. This was hellish, like every aspect of this environment had been designed specifically to torment him.

"What do you want?"

"Why do you care?" He realized the moment the words left his mouth that sarcasm was likely to cause another unpleasant retaliation, and couldn't help but flinch against a blow that didn't come.

The Batman sighed, leaning against the door to the refrigerator. He looked tired. Crane supposed that fighting crime, running a company, and keeping a hostage all at once wasn't exactly restful, but he'd never seen the Bat look this fatigued since the Joker's bout of dissociation. Had he decided that Crane wasn't enough of a threat to keep weakness hidden from? "Is it so hard to believe that I want to treat you like a human being?"

"Yes."

Another sigh. "Look. You're here. I don't want you here, and you don't want to be here, but until I figure out a way to fix this, I see no point in making things more difficult than they have to be. All right?"

Typical. What was it with people and the belief that if they acted as though there was a common ground between themselves and their opponent, they'd end up getting along? It hadn't worked with his therapists, and it wasn't about to work now. He'd expected more from the Batman, to be honest. Though why he'd expected more, he wasn't entirely sure. The man was clearly a paper umbrella short of a Shirley Temple, and anyone who thought dressing up as a vigilante bat was a good idea probably didn't have the best judgment.

"Jonathan?"

He bristled at that, fairly certain he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Exactly why having the Bat call him by his first name affected him so much, he wasn't sure—every psychiatrist he'd ever had operated on a first name basis, despite his protests—but it did. "I don't believe you." He straightened, brushing hair from his face, hair that had gotten far too long in his time here. He needed to get his hands on a pair of scissors. True, he had no idea how to cut hair, but he imagined that having unintentionally asymmetrical, short hair couldn't be worse than looking like a brunet Little Orphan Annie.

"Fine. Don't believe me. What can I give you that you'll eat?"

He considered asking for something ridiculously complicated out of spite. However, the nausea was still lingering, and imagining some complex meal would be asking to make himself sick. "I don't care."

"You need to eat something."

"I will. I just don't care what." He didn't need to look up to know that he was getting another one of those concerned looks he hated so much.

"Is your…condition any better?"

"If you mean "Am I still mad?"" Crane said, hands tensing against the table, "then yes. There's no point in tiptoeing around the issue, Batman. It's insulting."

The Batman shook his head, filling a glass with water. "The last time I asked you directly, you took that as an insult."

"It was."

"No, it wasn't." He held out the glass in one hand and the pills in the other. "Here."

Crane wondered if he should point out that mixing the pills with food when he was readjusting usually made him feel sicker. "Don't give me anything with grease in it."

"What?"

"The food," he snapped, before taking the pills. Being stuck here and degraded this way was bad enough without having to repeat himself.

"All right."

Crane glared at the Bat's back as the man rummaged through one of his cabinets. He got the feeling that he should be grateful that he wasn't being antagonized, but in practice, it only made him more annoyed. Angry Batman, he could handle, as well as Exasperated Batman. He was used to those. He was not used to the Batman trying to have a civil conversation with him. It was too reminiscent of several months prior, when the Batman had spent the better part of a day trying to convince him to return to Arkham, and protecting him from the Joker's murderous intentions. It was every bit as unsettling then as it was now.

Crane had never been one to handle change well. It wasn't that he couldn't adjust to new or unexpected developments, but he very much preferred not to have to. And he definitely did not want to adjust to his greatest enemy pretending to be nice while making him oatmeal. He had the overwhelming urge to take a page from Helen Keller's book and throw the spoon he was given across the room. The situation was bizarre to the point of being surreal.

He really regretted listening to the Joker now. It had been fruitless, and put him through great physical and mental suffering for no good reason. Worse, it had left him completely alone. He should have listened to the Scarecrow, created his own escape plan with his other self and let the Joker fend for hi—

_Escape plan._ He froze at the realization, all but deaf to the Batman's questions about what was wrong. Scarecrow had wanted to escape every bit as badly as the Joker, they both had, but he hadn't been willing to take part in a plan that would cause their body the damage it had. That was why he'd sealed himself off; partly in anger, but partly also to keep from feeling the effects of Jonathan's idiotic decision.

It was the escape plan that had caused him to leave, but not the idea of escape itself. He'd wanted out. As far as Jonathan knew—and there was no reason he could conceive of as to why his other half would suddenly enjoy captivity—Scarecrow still wanted to leave.

It could be that this was his punishment for going against Scarecrow; that Scarecrow wouldn't return until he got what he'd wanted in the first place: an escape that didn't involve going through madness to get out. Escape could be the trigger that would bring his friend back.

It was the best theory he had at the moment, anyway. And given that he was already a prisoner, it wasn't as if he had much he could lose if the attempt failed. The gain, on the other hand, the gain could be enormous.

Now the only question was how.

* * *

AN: In _The Miracle Worker_, Helen Keller throws the spoons her teacher tries making her use at first.


	7. Everybody's Looking For Something

AN: I meant to have this out last night…have you ever had one of those moments where you sit down to write and you know exactly what you want to say, but it just doesn't happen? Yeah. One of those. Sorry.

The chapter title comes from the song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by the Eurythmics, which is the song I was listening to as I wrote this chapter. It seemed fitting. There are two gory bits in this chapter, and sorry if I disgust anyone.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The Batman was doing that shoulder-shaking-to-gain-attention thing. He really needed to stop that. Crane wasn't sure exactly how he was going to repay the Batman for that sort of thing once he got out, but he knew it would be slow and painful. And terrifying. As always, he shoved the Bat's hand away, glaring. "What?"

"I've been trying to get your attention for the past five minutes." There was concern on his face that might or might not have been genuine, and either way, it pissed Crane off.

He wondered if that was an accurate measure of the time, or a hyperbole. It didn't feel as if he'd been contemplating escape for that long, but then, he did have a tendency to get lost in reflection. "Excuse me if I find my own thoughts to be more engaging than the present situation."

"You were thinking." Crane couldn't tell if it was a question or not.

"What? Are you going to deny me that privilege as well?"

He sighed. That seemed to be his second most common gesture, after growling. It was every bit as irritating as the first, but lacking the terror that those horrible rasped words could inspire. "You know, I'm giving you much more freedom than I have to."

"A prison is still a prison, whether it's a cell or a mansion."

"Are your hallucinations getting worse?"

"I don't believe," Crane said, voice almost cold enough to reach absolute zero, "that you have any right to pry about the one part of me you can't lock up."

"Except that you're in my house." Damn him for having the nerve to look put upon, as if this was all a burden on him. "And that makes it my business."

"I didn't ask to be here. You've got no one to blame but yourself for that."

"And I didn't ask to have you brought in here or to have you discover the truth. Are you getting worse or aren't you?"

He had a point, loath as Crane was to admit it. Rather than answer, he looked around for something to criticize, holding in a sigh of his own when nothing came to mind. Aside from the Joker's comment regarding the kitchen: "This stuff is in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order. He needs to get laid. Badly." He wasn't about to throw that in the Bat's face, much as he wanted to insult him. "Why did you bring me in here?"

"What?"

"If you wanted me to eat, why didn't you just bring me food like you always have?"

He expected some nonsense about wanting to give him options, or the opportunity to move around, or something like that. As such, for a moment he had no idea how to respond when the Batman answered, "I'm putting cameras in your room."

To his credit, he was able to keep his jaw from dropping. "What?"

"I'm putting—"

"I _heard _you." It was comprehension he was having the problem with. And belief. "You didn't have cameras up all ready?"

"It wasn't one of my priorities when we were trying to bring the Joker out of a coma," the Batman said quickly, defensively. So he recognized his stupidity. Good. Someone that idiotic shouldn't be blissfully unaware. How stupid did a person have to be before it started to hurt?

"Not a coma," Crane said automatically. "And it never occurred to you to install them in all of the time after that?"

"I was a little more concerned with keeping you from killing yourself, wasn't I?"

He blushed, and hated himself for it. "I want to go back to m—the room. Now."

"Fine." Crane was amazed it hadn't taken more of a struggle than one disparaging glance at his half-eaten breakfast. "Alfred should be through by now, anyway."

"I sincerely hope," he said, standing, "that your butler isn't the only hired help you have, as I'm sure cleaning this place is hard enough without cleaning up after your messes as well. Though I don't suppose using people troubles you."

The Batman stood as well, walking far too close for him to be at all comfortable with. He tried quickening his pace, but the Bat did that as well. "You know, when every word that comes out of your mouth is an insult, it starts to lose its effect."

Crane began to say "Go to hell," then realized he'd be proving the bastard's point and bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood. Which, in retrospect, hadn't been the best idea either. There were no visible cameras in the room, of course. The Bat couldn't risk them being seen and covered up. He paused in the doorway, looking back at his captor. "What day is it?" He hated to reveal his lack of knowledge, even on such a minor point, but it was vital.

"Saturday."

Damn it. And that meant that the Batman would be here until the night, when he put on his suit and left to "protect" the city. So much for the soonest escape possible. Good things did not, as they said, come to those who waited. He waited to face the Batman a second time in the basements of Arkham instead of taking the opportunity to escape, and look how that had turned out.

The Batman closed the door between them, and Jonathan retreated to the bed, staring up at the ceiling as he waited, either for sleep to come or night to fall. Whichever came first. He tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore the anxiety growing inside him. Alone. He was going to attempt escape alone. And that was something he'd never done. Even at Arkham, Scarecrow had been there. It didn't matter if Jonathan was the one to come up with the plan or not, he'd never gone through one without his other half. _Can I do this?_

He was finally drifting off when he answered his own question. _What choice do I have?_

* * *

Bruce couldn't recall the title after all the years, but he remembered that long ago, his mother had read him a book about a little prince. He barely remembered that, and the plot of the story had was completely lost, beyond a few fragments and characters. There was the prince, a flower, and a fox, that much he knew. And the prince had tamed the fox. That was one of the few elements of the actual story that had survived in his memories.

The prince had done so, he knew, by coming back to it day after day, and getting a little closer each time, until the fox felt safe around him. Bruce hadn't thought much of that story until recently, but the more he considered it as of late, the more he began to wonder if that wasn't how to tame something after all. Not that he wanted a tamed Scarecrow. Not in the sense of developing a friendship. That idea was as dangerous as it was distasteful. But a tolerance; that was something else entirely.

He didn't like Jonathan Crane, and he doubted he ever would, even if the man reformed. But at least he could be in Crane's presence and keep his temper somewhat hidden. Whereas his captive seemed to have no filter between his mind and his mouth or simply didn't use it if he did. And Bruce's presence, unlike the prince's, did nothing to tame the wild thing in his home. If holding him and comforting him and keeping him from falling apart hadn't had a positive effect, Bruce was beginning to think that nothing would.

He wanted the man gone, and it was imperative for both his mental health and the safety of his home that Bruce found a way to be rid of him soon. But in the mean time, he'd settle for civility. Which, unfortunately, seemed about as likely as hell freezing over.

He supposed that was what he got for basing real life practices on children's books.

* * *

Jonathan found himself in the hallway, without knowing how he got there. It seemed as if he had been in bed moments ago, but now he was in the hall. Had he taken up sleepwalking? Had the Batman neglected to lock the door? The questions circled in his mind for a moment, oddly lethargic, before he decided not to question an opportunity, and found himself walking just as suddenly as he'd found himself in the hall. A window. Trying the door again would be fruitless, for certain, as he had learned from his last attempt, but there was still no need to complicate things. If he tried and failed here as well, it would at least serve to improve the next endeavor.

After all, it wasn't as if the Batman's security was tight enough to keep him in the room, even if he was caught this time.

He continued to walk down the hall, turning corner after corner in search of either a window or a balcony or an exit that wasn't a door. He lost track of time, first focused on scanning the walls, and then focused on the carpet beneath him. Had it always been that yellow shade? And looked more like road than carpeting?

Jonathan wasn't sure how long he stared at it, but it was long enough for him to have left the house completely, apparently, as when he did look back up, he found himself in a forest. Deeply in the forest; so deep that there was barely any sunlight.

He realized that he should have felt confused, finding himself outside with no memory of leaving the mansion, but somehow, expanding the energy necessary to be concerned about it did not feel worth the effort. Nor did he feel elated about freedom, as Scarecrow was still missing. It seemed that escape was not enough. So he continued down the yellow road, on the assumption that if it had led him out, it could lead him to something else that would help.

Not much farther down, he happened upon a woman kneeling alongside the edge of the road. She was placing something there, a metal contraption that he was still too far away to identity. Her face was obscured by a hood, which attached to a cloak that covered most of her body. It was red on the side nearest him, and black on the other. The red side had three black diamonds along the bottom hem. Her body was obscured from his view, apart from the thin white hands touching the metal, and a lock of blonde hair which had slipped out of place. He noticed that there was a dark stain toward the center of the cloak, and what almost looked like a dent in the woman's back in the center of that.

He stopped when he was directly beside her, staring at her back. There was a dent, or to be more precise, a hole cut into her body. Not only the cloak, but the skin and bone beneath it as well. He could see muscle tissue and veins, and what might have been a glimpse of lung. The ends of ribs stuck out at the sides and the bones of the spine poked out from the top and the bottom. She was bleeding, though not heavily, and he surmised that the surrounding stain was her blood. He was considering whether he ought to speak or keep moving when she stood, blood spilling as she did, and turned to face him.

"Harley?"

"Sometimes," Harley said, expression more fitting the psychiatrist she had been than the villainess she now was, "I am unhappy with my life."

"You are bleeding," said Jonathan.

She shrugged, hands fiddling with another of the metal oddities.

"Why are you in this forest?" He wondered if she had seen Scarecrow, or if she was in a state to tell him if she had.

"Everyone is, really. But we're laying traps for bats," she explained, lifting the object. "Sometimes I wonder why I even bother."

It seemed to Jonathan that girls in red cloaks in the woods should be concerned with another animal, but he couldn't recall which. "Who else is in the woods?"

There was a hand on his shoulder, spinning him round, and the Joker was suddenly grinning wolfishly in his face. His gloved hands were on Jonathan's shoulders, and the left was covered in blood, down the sleeve to almost the elbow. "_Alors. Habille-la. Comment t'appelles tu? Qu'est-ce qu'il y a_?"

The first two statements made no sense, but he could answer the questions. "My name is Jonathan Crane. I cannot find my scarecrow."

The Joker was still grinning. It was not quite a smirk, but close. "I know where your scarecrow is."

"Where?"

The Joker didn't speak, but released Jonathan's shoulders, pointing at him.

"I am not Scarecrow," Jonathan said, hopes sinking.

"You look like a scarecrow." The Joker walked to Harley and shoved his bloodied hand into her back, as if she was a hand puppet. "Harley, doesn't he look like a scarecrow?"

"He is too well put together, my love," she said, smiling as she leaned against him.

Jonathan tried not to look at the area where the Joker's hand disappeared into his best friend. "If you are unhappy, Harley, why do you stay?"

Her brows furrowed, and she tilted her head. "I couldn't be happier." As if to prove her point, she kissed the Joker on the cheek, moving closer to him.

"You've forgotten something," the Joker said, looking at Jonathan rather than her. "Butyrophenones. Thioxanthenes. Pheniothiazines."

The words seemed familiar, but unimportant to his quest. He turned to Harley. "Have you seen my scarecrow?"

"No." She looked down at the road they were standing on, and ran a foot across it slowly. "But I think you may find him on this road."

"Clozaril," said the Joker.

"If you continue walking."

Jonathan stared at the road, which looked perfectly ordinary to him. "Why this road?"

"It is the right sort of road for scarecrows, I think. Do you think so, my love?"

"Prolixin," said the Joker. "Nozinan. Thorazine. You've forgotten something."

He opened his mouth to ask what he'd forgotten, when there was a rustle of wings and a loud snap from the woods nearby. The Joker ran after the sound at once, hand dripping Harley's blood over the ground as he moved. She followed after, slowly, now lacking her enthusiasm, and Jonathan behind her. "Did you find a bat?"

"Oh," said the Joker, with all the forlornness he could put into the syllable, "it is only a crow."

Jonathan stiffened, and Harley took his hand. "Do not be afraid, Jonathan. Look."

And he found himself looking, much as he didn't want to see. Caught in one of the traps, the crow struggled. Its body was untouched, but its wings had been impaled, multiple times, by the spikes of the trap. The bird's struggles were shredding its already ruined wings. It would never fly again.

Good.

"Why does the trap only close on the wings?" he asked.

"He doesn't want to kill the bat," Harley explained, as the Joker sighed and walked back to them. "Just to keep it from leaving him."

Jonathan thought that mutilating the bat _would _kill it, mentally if not physically, but he kept his opinion to himself. "Are there more crows here?"

"Dozens," said the Joker. "Have you remembered yet?"

Harley held his hand tighter. "We'll come with you, Jonathan."

The Joker shook his head, shoving his hand into her back again. "We cannot leave. In case of bats." He tilted his head toward the traps. "And you have to remember. Your scarecrow won't be happy if you don't."

Jonathan felt fear twist in his stomach, and turned towards Harley, imploring. She released his hand.

"I'm sorry, Jonathan. But I have to stay with my love."

He turned back to the bird, watched it rip itself free. Blood poured from the remains of the wings, more blood than the crow should have had to begin with. He felt a shudder run through him as the creature took a few lurching steps before collapsing, and tipping to the side in obvious death.

Then he turned back to the road, braced himself, and woke up.

* * *

Antipsychotics.

He remembered little of the dream, beyond that it was horrific, and there was blood, lots of it—he was fairly sure that Harley had been hurt—but more than anything, he recalled that the Joker had named types and brands of antipsychotics. And the Batman still had Jonathan's.

He stood, glanced at the window shades. He didn't need to lift them to know it was dark. It was raining—he could hear that through the window—but it was still too dark to have been caused by rain alone. Night, then. Hopefully, the Bat would be gone and the butler asleep.

He walked to the door, found it unlocked. Unbelievable. But he didn't question it, just stepped into the hall as he had in the dream. He had to stop by the Bat's room before he left, and find the pills if they were there. The Joker was right; Scarecrow wouldn't come back if he escaped only to go mad immediately afterward.

* * *

AN: I have no idea what goes on in my mind sometimes.

The book Bruce is thinking of is _The Little Prince._

What Joker says in French roughly translates to "So then. Dress it. What's your name? What's the matter?" It's a nonsense line from the second episode of Salad Fingers.

The dream dialogue is purposefully stilted/awkward. I don't remember the words in my dreams often, but I think they must be strange, as Neil Gaiman's dream dialogue in his _Sandman _comics ("Oh, oh, we are flying. I cannot fly when I am awake," and such) struck me as very familiar and realistic. So yeah.

You can always find a scarecrow on a yellow-brick road.


	8. Control

AN: Sorry for the slowness again. I worked yesterday night and morning and the time between was just sort of lethargic and unproductive. I suppose that's what I get for reading too much creepypasta and not sleeping until way too late. Anyway, I know this story's been moving at a much slower pace than the others, but I resolve to update at least every other day, lethargic or not.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Seven minutes past midnight.

At least, that was the time according to the clock on the microwave, when Jonathan had walked through the kitchen. Given that the kitchen was now a good distance behind him, it was probably something closer to nine or ten after. He hadn't expected to find the meds in the kitchen—though he had searched the cabinets, in case the Batman did keep prescriptions there—but going through that room had been nonetheless necessary as it was the only one that he remembered seeing a clock in, and wandering aimlessly looking for one somewhere else would be asking to get caught.

There was no clock in the guest room, after all. If there ever had been, the Batman had removed it. Once upon a time, the Joker's cell phone had functioned as their timekeeper, but apparently, he'd taken that with him when he left. That, or the Batman had taken it once he'd gone. Jonathan remembered little of the madness and tried not to dwell on what he did recall, but there was a very clear memory of slashing his arm open using the phone's charger; the clarity likely due to the few moments of lucidity the pain had brought. If Jonathan had been willing to be logical about the whole thing, he'd be forced to admit that removing the phone would have been in his best interests, but his logic was subdued at the moment by a burning Bat-hate.

Cell phones aside, the Batman should be gone by now, rain or no rain. And it was a heavy rain, a storm so powerful that the very foundations of the house seemed to rattle with the thunder. The Bat had any sense, he'd have stayed in. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop or engaging in fistfights in conditions like these was just asking to fall and get shot, or have his neck broken. But the Bat was obviously obsessed with fighting evil—the whole death of the parents issue was something Jonathan would have loved to analyze if it had been anyone else's problem—and even if he wasn't, he had another night life to uphold.

This, Jonathan unfortunately knew from watching tabloid television.

It wasn't that the news didn't cover Bruce Wayne's exploits as well, but only when there was nothing else to report, and then only if he did something ridiculous, like buying a hotel or dating some particularly high profile woman, and anyway, the television in Arkham's rec room was rarely on the news stations. This was to keep the stories of a more graphic nature to keep from upsetting or enticing the patients. During the Joker's reign of terror when he'd first arrived in Gotham, the news channels had been strictly forbidden after the first hostage tape aired. It was a shame, both because it was so amusing to watch the fear of the other patients' faces, trying to study their reactions to see what exactly was terrifying them without asking, and because without the news, the quality of what they did watch got even lower.

Jonathan, of course, was a high security patient, but not a violent one, so when he was allowed in the rec room, it was with not only the other nonviolent high security patients, but the low security ones as well. Most of the high security, like himself, refused to talk to the room's supervisors in order to request a station—though Edward Nigma would make exceptions to that when it came to _Jeopardy! _and _Wheel of Fortune_ and the like—and for whatever reason, the only low security patients that ever spoke up were young women, the type that giggled at everything and sat around braiding each other's hair and other equally ridiculous things. And they were always requesting the channels with celebrity gossip.

The thing about being brilliant was that Jonathan was able to multitask extremely well, and could listen to a radio or television or person speaking while reading or writing at the same time. Usually, when he wasn't interested in the background noise, he'd block it out—he'd gotten through most of his job as the administrator that way—but the volume these girls would watch their shows at made that impossible. He might have complained, but that would have taken effort. As such, the broadcasts would permeate into his mind when he was trying to focus on a medical journal or whatever book hadn't been damaged to the point of illegibility. The books weren't all that good either and seemed to consist of mostly romance. He'd been reluctantly willing to read Austen and the Brontës, but he drew the line at Nicholas Sparks.

Anyway, people like Bruce Wayne were the bread and butter of any such gossip show, and as such, he knew all about the man's Russian ballerinas and his dozens of Porches and every other little detail these vultures fed on to satisfy the gaping void in their own lives. Bruce Wayne definitely had a night life to rival his alter ego's. And midnight on a Saturday—Sunday, now—was still early for a Gotham socialite. So he ought to be out, leaving his room free for the searching.

In theory, at least. Jonathan wondering if sleepwalking would be a believable excuse should he be caught. Lying was not one of his talents. He'd been successful for the most part in deterring the questions of other doctors to cover his experiments in Arkham, but they'd still been suspicious, and likely just kept silent for the fear of losing their jobs.

He found the stairs and started up them, trying to make as little noise as possible. Even if the Batman was gone, his butler might be around, and the man knew how to defend himself. That was obvious just from a glance. He was old, but he might still be able to subdue someone, especially considering that fighting was also not one of Jonathan's talents.

He made his way up the stairs and down the hall without incident, and took approximately five steps into the Batman's bedroom before he heard the voice. "Did you need something?"

Crane managed to keep his face impassive—a laudable achievement, considering the mental swearing fit he was having at the time—as he turned and found the Batman sitting on the bed, reading some sort of file or folder or the like. Now that he thought of it, he supposed the man would have to know _something _about what his company did—he almost certainly got his weapons and such from them—but he'd never imagined the Bat reading reports or attending meetings or anything that normal. Especially not in the middle of the night. "I imagined you'd be out defending the city from people like yourself."

"Have you looked out the windows?" There was a note in the Batman's voice that was almost sulky, and he just barely tensed as he said it. So he'd wanted to go out, and there'd been a row about it, apparently. The idea of the Bat being ordered around by his hired help was beyond as amusing, though not as entertaining as it would have been had his chances of escape not just been shattered.

"And you didn't have some hotel heiress to take out?"

There was a pause in which the man looked mildly contemplative, as if trying to recall if there had been hotel heiresses among the women he'd dated. How disgustingly chauvinistic. "I'm taking a day off."

Day off? Then he'd been entertaining women and paparazzi all week? Crane's anger over being caught was abruptly and entirely dwarfed by his anger at that statement. The Batman had the nerve to go out and enjoy himself with prisoners locked in his house, like some sort of serial killer? It shouldn't have been so irritating, but the sheer audacity of it made it so. Why should he have that freedom when Crane was under house arrest? "Because going out drinking is such hard work."

"I don't drink." He stood, but thankfully didn't move to close the space between him. "What did you need?"

"Haven't we been through how I feel about accepting things from you?" he asked, resisting the urge to cross his arms. "I have to say that I can't understand why you're praised as such a brilliant detective if you can't comprehend things explained to you multiple times."

"Then why are you in here?"

He wasn't sure why the Batman's steadfast refusal to get angry was so annoying, but it absolutely was. "I felt like taking a walk."

"Could you not fall asleep or something?"

He felt his eye twitch involuntarily. "Are you implying that I'd come to _you _for comfort under any circumstance? I knew you had to be out of touch with reality to act the way you do, but I didn't realize you were mad to that extent."

That piteous expression again. Damn him. "You really don't remember the past week, do you?"

Crane tried to discern just what the Batman was implying. If he thought hard enough about it, he remembered a lot of crying, and occasionally being held by someone—no. Absolutely not. Even in madness, he would not have turned to the cause of that madness for comfort. Memory was unreliable; as a psychiatrist, he knew that better than most. He thought he remembered it only because it was suggested to him. "Liar."

"No, I'm not, but believe what you want. Like I'm doing now."

He blinked. "Excuse me?"

"The way I see it, there are three possibilities as to why you'd come in here," the Batman said, counting off on his fingers. "The first being that you were walking aimlessly and weren't aware of where you were headed, which I'd take as a sign that you're more out of it then I thought and need to be locked in for your own protection, which I doubt you'd like. The second being that you couldn't sleep, and the third being that you're attempting to break out and either came in here to vandalize my room before I left or to take something." The look in his eyes made it perfectly clear that he knew which possibility was the true one. "And if that was the case, I'd either have to lock you back up, or attach one of those house arrest bracelets to you. Or just put a tracking microchip under your skin, though that would be a last resort."

"Bastard."

"I never claimed to be nice." There was a hint of a smile on his face that was every bit as infuriating as the pity. "So I take it you couldn't sleep."

He wasn't going to dignify that with an answer. They both knew he'd been beaten, so what was the point?

"Do you need anything?"

"If you keep saying that, I'm just going to make the most complex, impossible requests I can think of, and then complain when they aren't fulfilled."

"You know that you're talking to a billionaire, right?"

As if he could miss that fact while standing in the middle of a giant mansion. "Just because you have the ability to fulfill a demand doesn't mean you will."

"Of course not. Do you need anything within reason?"

He felt what remained of his patience snap loudly. "For you to stop doing that, to begin with."

"Doing what?" He looked less smug or falsely worried now and more confused. Good.

"Pretending to be nice."

"You don't want me to be nice to you?"

"Obviously not, or I wouldn't have said that, would I?"

"So you'd prefer that your time here be spent with us at each other's throats?"

"I would prefer," he said tightly, "that my time here be spent away from you."

The bastard looked as if he was trying to hold back a laugh. He found the suffering of others amusing, apparently. Unsurprising. "Well, if that's the way you want it, you should probably not come into my bedroom."

Crane went an absolutely glowing shade of scarlet and for a few seconds just stood there, trying to think of something he could say that would both be biting and bring the argument back to his favor. After those few seconds, he realized he had nothing and did the next best thing, which was to turn and walk out the door as quickly as he could.

He heard the Bat call after him, too enraged with the man—and with himself—to make out the individual words.

"Go to hell," he offered in response, just turning the corner that led to the stairs when a hand grabbed hold of his own.

"We need to talk," the Batman said, as if his captive was not flailing with all the force he had in his body which, admittedly, wasn't much.

"Unhand me!"

"I'm not hurting you."

"Let go!"

"Listen to me." Forcefully but not painfully—unless Crane struggled, which he did—the Batman pushed him against the wall, and pinned him with his free hand. "I'm not hurting you. What I don't think you understand is that I _could_, if I wanted."

He stopped struggling immediately, eyes meeting the Batman's for the first time since the man had made contact. "Are you threatening me?"

"No, I'm stating a fact. You've fought me before. You know I can do damage if I try. I could break every bone in your body without breaking a sweat. But I don't _want _to. I've given you more freedom than I should, more than is even _safe_, because I'm sure you'd have no qualms about slitting my throat if you can across me sleeping, and I've tried to treat you like a civilized person in spite of the fact that you're acting exactly like a child throwing a tantrum. I let you cry on me for hours on end when you were too out of it to care about preserving your dignity, and if you want to get into all I've done before you were even _here_, I kept the Joker from killing you and stopped you from killing yourself by running away from Arkham when you were half-starved, and I gave you medical attention when you shot yourself with a nail gun instead of just knocking you out and letting the police deal with it. If you want to get _really _technical, I probably saved your life in that parking garage by keeping you from getting shot by the mob."

He paused for breath, but Crane could tell that it wasn't the end of the rant. It was as if someone had opened a floodgate. It might have been amusing if he was only witnessing it, but when it was all directed at him, it was absolutely terrifying. He hoped the Bat hadn't noticed that he was shaking. It would probably make him all the more uncontrolled, like a shark catching the scent of blood.

"Do you have _any _idea what a huge risk you are to me? You're worse than the Joker when it comes to knowing who I am, because at least he probably won't tell because it would spoil his fun. Every second I let you stay in this house is a second for you to find more evidence to prove what I am to the press when you do get out of here. And if that wasn't bad enough, you seem to be _trying _to be as unlikeable as you possibly can. And I'm trying to be _nice. _I could have thrown you out on the streets when you lost it. Who'd believe a homeless madman rambling about my identity? I could have had you drugged and thrown on a ship headed to the other side of the planet. I could have found a combination of drugs that would have destroyed your long term memory and pumped them into your system so you wouldn't be a danger to me or anyone else. But I didn't. So I'd appreciate it if you stopped trying to push me over the edge, because you won't like it if you succeed."

Crane would have liked very much to have been able to say something about how the fact that the Batman had even considered those things was very telling, but he was unable to speak. Not because his sense of self-preservation had suddenly kicked in, but because he hadn't seen the Bat this angry since the time he'd drugged Rachel Dawes, and his vocal cords were too paralyzed to do anything except make that annoying, almost barking sound they did when he froze up like this.

The Batman seemed to take that in, along with the sudden paleness and wide-eyedness of his captive, and visibly forced himself to be controlled. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I lost—I didn't mean to scare you. Let's just go back to your room now, all right?"

Crane had quite a few powerfully negative feelings about being put back in bed by the Batman—who was still, for no adequately explored reason, holding his hand—but he kept silent for once in his life for fear of provoking the man into all that he'd threatened.


	9. Dreaming Again

AN: Ever heard of Murphy's Law? I seem to be living it. Last night I somehow spilled water all over the keyboard of my laptop (the thing I do all my writing on) and the mouse bit stopped working, so I called tech support only to find that water damage isn't covered under my warranty, and I'd have to send it in to do a price estimate, leaving me with nothing but the one computer my entire family shares. This morning, the laptop started mysteriously working again, but now the Internet and cable are out in my house for no good reason, so I'm typing this up in the library. So if I'm slow on review replies, sorry, I'll get to them as soon as I can.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Once again he found himself in the forest, but this time it was darker, the trees seeming to have spread their branches to block out as much light as they possibly could, which was essentially all of it. How Jonathan could still see, he wasn't quite sure, but it seemed better not to question it. It would be impossible to stay on the road if he couldn't see it, short of getting on his hands and knees and feeling for its smooth surface.

If things continued on like this, he'd end up having to do that anyway. The road had grown more unkempt along with the trees, roots and dirt and molded leaves snaking across the path. It hadn't gotten to the point where he had to kick the things out of his way to see yet, thank goodness, but it there was a growing concern in his mind that it might. Or that the road ahead may have fallen into such disrepair that it may as well not exist. He had no idea how he'd find Scarecrow if that was the case.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been walking before he heard the steps behind him. He stiffened when he did hear them, too apprehensive to turn his head and see the source of the noise. It occurred to him, suddenly, how completely alone he was—apart from this intruder—and that if the woods held things like crows and bats, they could hold something even worse. What could be worse than either of those creatures, he wasn't quite sure, but he wasn't in a hurry to find out either.

As it happened, he didn't have to turn his head, because the thing began to move at a speed which he could tell would soon meet or surpass him. The steps, Jonathan observed through his fear, were uneven and the creature's breathing disturbed, though whether from pain or excitement, he had no way of knowing. Occasionally there was a metallic clang of sorts, followed by a particularly sharp intake of breath. Jonathan was just starting to work out whether or not he ought to start running when the creature did catch up with him, revealing itself to be nothing worse than the Joker. Not that the Joker was a welcome development, not exactly, but he wasn't as bad as the bats or the emptiness, and at the moment, any almost any companion was better than being alone this way.

The Joker appeared to have caught himself in his own traps. That, or he'd purposefully mutilated himself. Whatever had happened, one of the contraptions was affixed to either leg, no doubt responsible for the mix of pain and ecstasy in the Joker's expression and the rivers of blood coming out of him, enough to have dyed the better part of the road behind them red. Jonathan had no idea how he hadn't bled to death yet, but knowing the Joker, he didn't need blood to run his body. Just spite.

"Where is Harley?"

"Bedlam." Despite his obvious pain, or perhaps because of it, he sounded bright as ever.

"What happened to you?"

"I caught a bat." His steps slowed as he recalled and Jonathan lessened his own speed to match him, watching his friend's eyes cloud with the memory. "Only the bat caught me as well."

"How?" Jonathan remembered the bird stuck in the trap, the way the metal had sliced through its wings as if they weren't there at all. If something as evil as a crow couldn't overcome that, how could a bat?

"He spoke," the Joker said. "At length. And in his speech, he made me lower my guard and drew me in to the point where there was no other recourse."

"You stepped into them without realizing it?"

"Don't let's be silly," said the Joker, and then took a wrong step so that one trap slammed into the other, blood visibly draining from his face, even under the makeup. The spikes of that trap slid further into his leg, and the flow of blood that spilled through the fabric of his pants grew. The clown shook his head, gave the faintest of smiles, and continued. "I stepped into them myself."

"Why?"

"I knew and the bat did not, and the course of love never did run smooth."

"Sometimes," said Jonathan, returning to his former speed, "I feel that you make no sense at all."

"At least I am not looking for myself."

"Neither am I."

The Joker said nothing in response, hand disappearing into his violet coat as his other reached out and took Jonathan's. The glove was covered in blood, either the clown's or Harley's, and Jonathan noted that the substance had an almost oily feel to it, more like the Joker's makeup than any blood he'd ever felt. For once, his mind stopped focusing on following the path and instead began to try and work out just what that signified. He was so preoccupied with puzzling it out that he had no time to react when the Joker pulled his arm forward, other hand reemerging with a knife, and sliced across his wrist.

It hurt, and it bled, even more so when the Joker shoved his hand into the wound, pushing in despite Jonathan's struggles. He could feel the Joker's fingers digging around inside of him, and just when he'd resolved to kick the clown in the legs as hard as he could, the Joker pulled back, a length of bloodied straw between his thumb and index finger. "Do you know what this is called, Jonathan?"

Transfixed, he reached out to touch it, only to have it vanish the instant his fingers made contact. The occurrence was immediately sobering. "If I cannot contact him, it makes no difference where he resides."

"_In sanguis, veritas_," the Joker countered. "_Sanguis vita est._"

"It is his straw."

"It is your blood. As mine is mine." The Joker raised the hand that had been holding Jonathan's, the one presumably coated in his own blood, and very gently ran it over his friend's face. It felt as his lipstick had, when Jonathan had last felt it.

"But you are only you."

"I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together," the Joker said with a shrug. "This is your house."

"You make no sense." Jonathan pressed his hand against the wound to stop the bleeding. This clearly was not a house. And the house he did own never had a forest in it. The illogic of that idea somehow struck him more than the rest of the absurdity.

"In my Jonathan's house, there are many rooms. Is it worth all this because one is locked?" He took the knife, wiped the blade of the sleeve of his already-stained coat, and twirled the weapon between his fingers with no regard to safety.

Jonathan was still unable to make heads or tails of the conversation, and so continued walking as if the Joker hadn't spoken.

The Joker's response, however, was to grab the back of Jonathan's shirt and drag his feet so they were barely moving at all. "You do not listen very well."

The only thing that kept him from kicking the Joker's injuries as hard as he could was the promise of terrible pain to follow. "And what would you have me do?"

"You know," said the Joker, "it is a funny thing about this road." He stamped one foot against it as if to emphasize his point, then seemed to immediately regret it as he doubled over, wincing.

Jonathan waited for him to recover. "What about it?"

"Roads like this. They lead to shoe-tapping."

"I do not think the English language is meant to be used the way that you use it."

"If I had told you," the Joker said, "would you have believed me?" He stopped toying with the knife, and tried shining the blade of it on the cuff of the coat. He only succeeded in getting it bloodier.

"Say what you mean."

"Learn to be lonely," the Joker suggested, somehow managing to suck blood off the blade as if it were a lollipop and speak at the same time.

"I cannot survive alone."

"Communist."

"Anarchist."

"_Si, señorita._"

"If you haven't anything helpful to say, it would be better not to speak."

"What is a scarecrow? A miserable pile of straw. If you prick it, it does not bleed. If you tickle it, it does not laugh."

Jonathan held up his bleeding wrist to counter him. "What do you call that, Joker?"

"I thought that you were not a scarecrow."

"He lives in me."

"And yet here I am, and here you are." This time, the Joker wisely chose not to stomp on the road, but only wave a hand at it. "What, pray tell, does that say to you, my agricultural friend?"

Jonathan brushed past the Joker and quickened his pace. "That he has left."

The clown responded by flicking his fingers against the back of Jonathan's head. "There's a monster at the end of this book."

He turned around slowly, biting his lower lip to keep from shouting. "Joker, if you are not going to be helpful, you might as well leave."

The Joker took his hand. It was not an apology, because the Joker didn't know what an apology was, but Jonathan chose to think of it as one. He saw less red that way. "If you do not succeed, will you try try again?"

"With what?"

"Finding your ever-aftering so happy."

"He will return. He always does."

The Joker held his hand slightly tighter, though the intent did not seem to be to inflict pain. "Always is always until it is not."

"Then I will be alone." He did not need to add, "And perish" for it to be understood. Human contact was one of the basest levels of Maslow's hierarchy, after the things necessary for physical survival.

Pushing his tongue around in his mouth, the Joker seemed to muse that over. Then he stopped, glancing down at his bloodied legs. "This hurts."

"I would imagine so."

"It hurts very badly. But the conversation very nearly made up for it."

"I dislike your choice in conversation partners. Aside from myself," he added, before the Joker start. "No, thank you."

"You could wile away the hours, conferring with the flowers."

His eye twitched, a thousand and one biting come backs appearing in his head just after the moment for a reply had passed.

"Jonathan."

"What?" he asked, through clenched teeth.

"Jonathan, what will you do if you come to a crossroads, Jonathan?"

What kind of a question was that? The Joker was mad, but not stupid. "Find my Scarecrow, of course."

"Jonathan."

"What?"

"I can't believe it's not butter."

Of every word that had come out of the Joker's mouth from the start of this conversation, that made the least sense of them all, and that was quite an accomplishment. "Excuse me?"

"Jonathan."

* * *

Jonathan opened his eyes to find the Batman staring down at him and immediately flinched. The man wasn't right over top of him, but the foot and a half of space between them was still far too close for comfort, especially after last night. It seemed the Bat had decided to somewhat respect his desire for personal space and, rather than shaking him into consciousness this time, only said his name several thousand times until he woke up.

Jonathan got the distinct feeling that it was going to be a very long day.

* * *

AN: I think I'm addicted to dream sequences. Finding the right balance between the absurd and the symbolic is just too fun. With that said, the actual physical story is going to keep right on progressing (at least, in my odd style of progressing), don't worry.

The Bedlam House was a sadistic British mental institution that existed in the time before mental illness was humanely treated. People used to be able to pay a penny to come in and watch the inmates or poke them with sticks. Maslow's hierarchy is a psychological construct that defines what people need to achieve self-actualization.

_In sanguis, veritas. Sanguis vita est._ Latin for "in blood, truth. Blood is life." Or literally, "blood life is." Stuff like this is why I call Latin Yoda-speak.

"I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together" is a lyric from The Beatles' "I Am the Walrus." "In [my father's] house there are many rooms" comes from the Bible. "What is a scarecrow? A miserable pile of straw" is a modified version of one of Dracula's lines in _Castlevania, _and the pricking-bleeding tickling-laughing thing comes from _The Merchant of Venice._ "Ever-aftering so happy" is from the _Enchanted _song "True Love's Kiss," and _There's A Monster At the End of This Book _is a Seasame Street book that focuses on Grover panicking about the reader turning pages because it brings them closer to the monster at the end of the book, which turns out to be Grover himself.

The Joker makes a number of _The Wizard Of Oz _references, most notably "wile away the hours, conferring with the flowers." "I can't believe it's not butter" is the catch phrase in commercials for the margarine product of the same name. Wow, I made a lot of references this time.


	10. Trying Again

AN: My Internet is still out (we're having someone look at it this afternoon) so sorry if I'm slow on the replies. I don't know if I'll be able to update tomorrow, as I'm going to go see _Up _with a friend after I get off work.

As the brilliant Elizabeth Tudor (read her stories; she's fantastic) pointed out, I forgot to mention one allusion last chapter. The Joker's line "Learn to be lonely" is also the title of a song from the 2004 _Phantom of the Opera _film. If I've missed anything else (and I probably did; I made about ten thousand of them) let me know.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan Crane's instinctive response to him was to flinch.

That shouldn't have been important. It really wasn't, when put into perspective. Given all the troubles in the world today, including but certainly not limited to overpopulation, global warming, genocide, human trafficking, war, poverty, AIDS, prejudice, and urban crime, the fact that one of his enemies—a man he'd _meant _to inspire fear in, after all—was scared of him wasn't worth the effort it took to be concerned about it. Of course, separating logic from emotion had never been one of Bruce's stronger points. He doubted that Batman would exist if it had.

Crane sat up immediately afterward, expression contemptuous. "How long have you been standing there?"

He shrugged. "Ten minutes?" If the man was the least bit grateful about not being forcibly awakened this time, he didn't show it. Not that Bruce had expected him to. Crane had apparently resigned himself to making the worst of the situation and it was ridiculous to think the events of last night would have changed that. If anything, they'd have made it worse. He still hadn't fully forgiven himself for losing control like that, even considering that Crane had practically been begging for it and he'd sincerely apologized the second after the incident. Apologizing didn't undo the damage, or change the fact that, like it or not, even when medicated Crane was severely unbalanced. Frightening him when he wasn't causing anyone harm or committing a crime was akin to terrorizing any other mental patient.

It didn't alleviate the guilt in the least to admit to him that losing control had been immensely satisfying, before the rational part of his mind caught up.

"And I suppo—" Crane cut off mid-word, seeming to decide against speaking his mind. That was almost certainly a good thing. "What do you want?"

He held out the glass of water and pills, wordless. It seemed better to kept things taciturn rather than risk another outburst, on either of their parts. Crane went faintly pink—Bruce wondered if he did this with the nurses as well, or if it was Bruce's presence that made taking the medication flustering—but took them, equally reticent. He swallowed, staring at Bruce, for once with more confusion than animosity.

"Don't you work?"

It took Bruce a minute to figure out what he was asking. "Yes. But I don't have to be there for another hour and a half." The idea of leaving Alfred alone with Crane didn't sit well with him, but he'd missed far more days that usual due to the whole "villains in the house" problem, and if he kept that up for much longer, it might start to look suspicious. Even for Bruce Wayne. "Are you hungry?"

He shook his head.

"Do you need anything else?"

"Don't confuse your guilt with concern, Batman," Crane said, so softly that he had to lean in to catch the words. "They aren't the same thing, and the latter doesn't fit you at all."

Bruce tried not to sigh, reflecting on all the arguments he could make, but knew he wouldn't. Jonathan Crane held the same hatred for him that he held for the Joker, and no matter how many times he'd argued, as patiently as he could, that he did not want to cause the villains unnecessary pain or anguish and would much prefer their recovery to the fighting, it always fell on deaf ears. The day they'd had to spend together last February, when the Joker had been trying to kill Crane, had been proof of that. One proof after another, actually, _ad infinitum._ So he chose to ignore that part of the statement. "You know, that's not my name."

"It's bad enough that you insist upon being on a first name basis on my side. What would you prefer I call you?"

Bruce found that he didn't have an answer for that. He'd started using Crane's first name only because he refused to give the man the title of doctor—after all he'd done to violate the Hippocratic oath, he certainly didn't deserve it—and while it was hypocritical, he didn't exactly enjoy the idea of the man speaking to him that familiarly. "Never mind."

Crane didn't have to say "I told you so" for it to be completely obvious that that was what he was thinking.

"Are you sure that you don't need anything?"

"What difference does it make?" He didn't quite snap the words, clearly trying to restrain his anger. He was failing, but at least he was making an effort, which was more than could be said for last night. "You're going to lock me in and forget about me for the next eight hours or so anyway."

"I'm not locking you up."

He intended the words to have a calming effect, but Crane's response was instant suspicion. "Why not?"

"Because eventually, you're going to get hungry, and you're not going to be able to break out if you try." When Crane's response stayed distrustful as ever, he shook his head, letting out the sigh he'd been holding in. "I'm trying to be nice, all right? Is that so hard to believe?"

Crane once again thought better of speaking the words he'd opened his mouth to say and only nodded.

"Why? It makes my day much less stressful if you're not complaining or trying to break out."

"So your motives are entirely based on your own comfort, then?"

As if a chronic narcissist had any right to lecture him on selfish drives. "I never claimed to be a saint."

"I would hope not," he muttered, and flinched again, looking surprised when Bruce didn't retaliate. Once again, it was more painful than it should have been to realize that Crane was so quick to think Bruce would hurt him without reason.

"Look, I am sorry about last night. I shouldn't have threatened you like I did. I just—I wasn't trying to scare you."

"You didn't," he said, louder than necessary, the second Bruce had finished speaking.

It wasn't worth challenging, even if it was blatantly false. "All right. I'm still sorry."

"Why?"

"Because you didn't deserve that." Honestly, he had deserved it, but Bruce couldn't imagine that the truth, which was "because it's wrong to shout at someone mentally ill for the sole purpose of relieving stress, even if that person was being as rude and unpleasant as he possibly could," would go over well.

Crane didn't speak, only held out the glass. He flinched again when Bruce took it back, though he'd been careful to make his movements slow and obvious enough to prevent them from being threatening. Apparently it hadn't worked. For someone who claimed to be the master of fear, Crane was startled more easily than a horse. Bruce had already known that, given their fights together, but it wasn't until the man was around him nearly twenty-four seven that it had really sunk in. "Last chance to ask for something you need."

He stayed silent.

"All right. I'm leaving now. You know where the kitchen is, right?"

Crane nodded, the fear gone from his eyes, replaced by a light that indicated the wheels in his head were spinning at full speed. Which probably meant he was scheming. That didn't bode well. "Don't try anything. Believe me, you'll only make things worse for yourself if you do."

He didn't answer, but did flick his eyes upwards to Bruce in indication that he'd heard.

"Goodbye."

* * *

Jonathan listened for the door to click when the Batman closed it, but there was no telltale sound of the lock. It seemed the Bat had been keeping his word. All the better for Jonathan. He'd have thought that someone like the Batman would realize that being trusting in a place like Gotham was akin to leaving all of one's valuables unattended on a street corner, but apparently not. For someone so good at solving mysteries and apprehending criminals, he really was a complete idiot.

On the other hand, this could be some sort of elaborate trap. For all he knew, the Batman could be right outside the door, waiting to catch Jonathan on his way out so that he could justify chaining him up or throwing him back into the cave without adding to his guilt. It seemed unlikely, but it wasn't a possibility he was going to overlook until he was sure that wasn't the case. He waited for over five minutes, hoping that if the Bat was there, he'd have lost interest and gone by this point, and then slid off the bed, as quietly as possible.

He didn't make a sound as he moved across the floor. He'd perfected the art of taking silent steps far back in his childhood, using it whenever it seemed safe enough to risk sneaking into the kitchen at night. He'd never exactly been starved as a child, but his great-grandmother had preferred to send him to bed hungry nine times out of ten. Her reasoning for it was that they were poor, and his reasoning had been that she was a sadistic, hateful bitch, and that wasn't a word he used often.

Upon reaching the door, he slowly sank to the floor and stared through the gap between the carpeting and the door. The light coming in from the hall was continuous; there were no breaks in the flow where someone might be standing. Of course, just because he wasn't directly in front of the door, it didn't mean that he wasn't out there. Well, he had said that Jonathan was allowed out. As long as he didn't look as if he was making another escape attempt when he stepped outside, he supposed he'd be safe. At the very least he could call the Batman out on his hypocrisy should the man decide to imprison him again, and the blow to his moral code might stop him. If not, well, captivity was captivity, wherever it was served.

Slowly, he opened the door, prepared to slam it shut if he found that he wasn't alone.

The hallway was empty. For a moment, Jonathan lingered in the doorway and considered his options. It would be wise to assume that all of the doors had been equipped with locks as the front door had. The windows seemed as if they should be guarded in some way, but they were still the next best option. It wasn't as if he could climb up the chimney, after all, and he didn't have any sort of rope—unless he wanted to make one out of bed sheets, and he doubted that would hold his weight—so the balconies were out as an escape route, unless he wanted to jump and risk mutilating his legs or other body parts as badly as the Joker's had been in his dream.

That left the windows. If they had been somehow safeguarded, they couldn't have been kept from opening—Bruce Wayne, according to the tabloids, had massive parties on occasion and windows that were nailed shut would surely be noticed—or booby-trapped, so that left the possibility of a silent alarm. Really, he'd waited for closer to ten minutes than five, and judging by the time frame the Batman had given, the Palisades' distance from Wayne Enterprises, and the usual morning traffic jam, the Bat should be gone by now. The butler would be the only one left, and someone his age couldn't be that fast of a runner. It was Jonathan's best option, at any rate.

He walked in the direction away from the front door, stopping at the first window he saw. He examined the frame and the glass. There wasn't any sort of visible alarm system, but that didn't mean anything. He glanced around and, seeing no one, took a deep breath, unlocked the window and forced it open.

There was no audible alarm.

If Scarecrow had been around, he likely would have shouted at Jonathan to get moving immediately. While he was the less book smart of the pair, it was Scarecrow that had the common sense. As he was gone, however, Jonathan stood for a moment or so, stunned that this escape attempt hadn't been harder, before remembering the possibility of a silent alarm. Cursing his stupidity, he shoved the screen out and put his hands on the sill, forcing himself through.

He was halfway out when a hand grabbed onto his ankle and pulled him back inside.


	11. Sacrament

AN: Today I read that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Apparently, the writer had never heard the rest of the quote "but the highest form of intelligence." I love Oscar Wilde. As well as George Bernard Shaw; "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it" is another of my favorites. Yeah, I love snark quite a bit.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

If he'd been given the chance to do things over, Crane had to admit that he would have done a number of things differently regarding his latest escape attempt. Such as not being so lost in the possibility of freedom that he forgot to do the actual escaping. Or trying it immediately after being left alone, when there was a high chance of someone being around to intercept him. Or going for something as ridiculously obvious as a window in the first place. Clearly, refuge in audacity had failed, and he should have realized that after the whole "leaving through the front door" thing.

Of course, these were the sort of things he realized when it was already too late.

That seemed to be the story of his life, honestly. Things that should have been readily apparent never where until it was too late. Like building up an immunity to his toxin before it was used against him, or that it was always better to run from adversity as opposed to trying to fight it, especially when adversity took the form of an unbalanced vigilante in a bat costume or a bloodthirsty clown. His therapists often said that this was because he was a narcissist, and one of the classic symptoms of narcissism was a sense of entitlement that suggested normal consequences shouldn't apply to the afflicted.

Crane preferred to believe that it was because his mind was working too fast and too brilliantly to get caught up in the mundane details.

While that was usually a brightening thought, it was decidedly less so when he found himself jerked back inside, slamming none too gently against the wall opposite the window as he found himself looking up at the Batman's displeased butler. He looked—well, angry wasn't quite the word for it. More annoyed with a touch of resignation, like a parent who'd reluctantly bought a puppy under the understanding that the children would be the ones responsible for it, only to find himself up at all hours of the night scrubbing the carpets. Crane got the feeling that he would feel insulted by the man's expression if he weren't preoccupied with simultaneously being self-disgusted, apprehensive, and angry.

Later on, when the instinctive part of his mind caught up with the neurotic bit, he'd reflect that this was another of those times that he should had used to run. After all, he'd already been caught and would suffer the consequences if he cooperated, so why not take another chance? However, the sensible part of him was slow-moving as ever, and so he just sat there for a minute, gaping. "I—how—"

"There's an alarm on the windows," the man explained. In the hand that hadn't grabbed his ankle, Crane noticed what appeared to be either a cell phone or a walkie-talkie or something else that apparently corresponded to the alarm. "And it broadcasts where in the manor it was set off. I happened to be in the area."

Crane decided that "happened to be in the area" probably meant lurking around like a hawk waiting to strike. Maybe not; the butler did seem less "justice"-driven and mad than his employer, but Crane wasn't in the mood to be generous at the moment.

"I'd ask if you honestly expected that to work," the butler said, "but as I found you halfway through the frame, I'm going to assume that you did."

Crane's instinct for self-preservation choose that moment to kick in, and he scrambled to his feet, tried to decide whether to dive for escape or run for another exit, and found himself grabbed in the instant he was standing, arms pinned behind him in a hold that was tight but painless. He expected it would remain that way unless he struggled.

Once again, his belief that the butler wouldn't serve too much of a threat was proven wrong in the worst possible way.

"You know, I may have more water under the bridge than Master Wayne," he said, apparently reading Crane's thoughts, "but I'm not entirely worthless." He seemed to consider his words. "Or at all, really." He pushed Crane forward, slightly. "Move."

Crane dug his heels against the carpet. If he had to be a prisoner, he wasn't going to be humiliated and dragged as well. "Let go of me."

"Dr. Crane, I was a SAS sergeant for a good portion of my life. While I'm sure you're quite intimidating to the average Gotham layman, I've experienced too much to be coerced by a man who wears a burlap sack on his head. Especially without the burlap. Now move."

The butler's grip tightened to the verge of pain, and Crane found himself reluctantly forced forward. In the direction away from the room he'd been put in, oddly. "Where are we going?"

"To see if Master Wayne's gone yet. If he hasn't, he's dealing with you, and if he has, you'll be locked in your room to think about what you've done until he gets back."

_I'm being scolded by the Batman's butler_, Crane realized amidst his growing anger and panic. Somehow, things seemed to have gone crazier with the Joker's departure. How was that even possible?

As it turned out, the Bat had not gone yet, as they found when he came hurtling around the corner of the hall and very nearly trampled them. He stood there for a few seconds with an incredibly idiotic expression on his face, before collecting his bearings and managing, "Oh. You found him, then?"

* * *

"Sir, if this is your standard response time, I have to wonder how you manage to apprehend any criminals."

Bruce didn't bother explaining that his phone had gone off while he was halfway through changing and he'd assumed having shoes on—not to mention pants—would more than likely be necessary at some point during the villain-chasing business; taking advantage of the moment to assess the situation instead. Crane didn't appear to have done any damage to Alfred, or vice versa. Vice versa being more probable.

Alfred pushed Crane toward him. "I believe we agreed that I wouldn't be looking after your guests?"

"Yes." He hoped his exasperation at the situation hadn't slipped into his voice. He doubted Alfred would appreciate it, and Crane would try to act on any weakness he noted. Well, there went going into work on time. Right when he was beginning to prefer the monotony of the office to dealing with the manor and its unwelcome but trapped inhabitant. Who was only going to be _more _unpleasant after this, if that was even possible. He took hold of the man as Alfred let go, leading him in the direction of the stairs.

"I can walk on my own."

"And I don't trust you not to try something."

"I'm not moving unless you let go." Bruce was all but dragging him at this point, making the situation even more frustrating. He had to know that Bruce could make him move, and make it painful, but he was still acting like a cross child even when it was obviously going to get him nowhere.

"Last warning, Jonathan."

Calling him by name had been a mistake, as Bruce realized the second after he'd said it and Crane became immediately stiffer and more resistant to movement. "If you don't take your hands off of me right now—"

Bruce let himself sigh as he threw Crane over one shoulder and walked, trying to ignore the ineffectual kicks and punches hammering him every other second. "You brought this on yourself, you know."

"Put me down!"

"No. I've tried to give you as much freedom as I possibly could under the circumstances, and tried to be as civil as I could make myself—which took an inhuman amount of effort, not that you care—but obviously, that hasn't made a bit of difference to you, so I really don't care if you hate being carried." He nudged the door to the master bedroom open with his foot, closing and locking it behind them before he walked the rest of the way in and dropped Crane on the bed, keeping him pinned with one hand as he opened the box he'd gotten from Lucius earlier that week with the other.

Crane stopped struggling long enough to stare at him, wide-eyed. "What the hell is that?"

"GPS ankle bracelet."

He might as well have said chloro-trifluoromethane, the way Crane reacted. His struggles returned instantaneously, and violently enough that Bruce was forced to sit on top of him to keep him still enough to grab one of his legs. And facing away from Crane to get the thing on left his back entirely exposed to the flurry of punches and scratches the man was inflicting. Well, this day just kept getting better and better.

"I warned you there'd be consequences if you tried to run."

If Crane heard him through the fit he was throwing, he gave no indication. It wasn't as if the man had ever been particularly open to communication in the first place. Bruce ignored his struggling as best he could—some of it was actually painful, this time—and put the bracelet around his ankle, strapping it into place. Having the thing on wouldn't keep him from slipping out, but it would broadcast his location from anywhere within a hundred mile radius. And the battery life, which would kick in the moment he got out of range from the receiver in the house, would go for days without giving out. It wasn't foolproof, but it was a hell of a lot better than any of Bruce's other options, unless he wanted to micro-tag Crane.

There was a sound from behind him of something being knocked over, and it occurred to him they were close enough to the edge of the bed to allow Crane access to his nightstand. He wasn't if anything on it could be used as an effective weapon, but he didn't want to find out. He let go, turning just in time to have Crane slam the alarm clock against his head, about half an inch behind the temple, and hard enough that Bruce thought he might have felt the plastic crunch.

Ears ringing and eyes watering, he was disoriented by the blow. Only for a moment, but that moment was long enough for Crane to struggle free and run into the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

* * *

The rational part of Jonathan admitted, as it had with the window, that this had been an incredibly stupid idea. There was a window in this bathroom as well, but he was on the second floor, and being tracked even if he did get out without hurting himself.

The rational part was completely buried under the irrational side, whose only thoughts were "have to get out" and "have to get this off" over and over and over again. The fact that the Batman had apparently recovered and was pounding on the other side of the door didn't help in the least. The strap was too tight to slide off, and pulling on it accomplished nothing but pain. He couldn't tell if it had a locking portion or what; only that he couldn't remove it, and that made him hyperventilate all the more.

He searched through the bathroom's cabinets, dumping out the drawers and rooting feverishly through them for anything with a cutting edge. His last resort was the mirror, as glass had a horrible edge and dulled almost at once. He wasn't even sure if the strap could be cut. It didn't matter. Escape was his only priority.

It wasn't a desire. He _had _to get out. If he didn't, he'd never get Scarecrow back and he'd never lived alone. Never. His other half had been there from the start of his memories and he couldn't survive without him. And now the Bat had brought along this latest torture to keep him in. Jonathan was starting to feel light-headed, nauseous as he searched. He was aware on some level that he was over-oxygenating his blood by breathing like this, but he couldn't force himself to calm down. Whether this was a panic attack, or just a realization of the futility of the situation, he wasn't sure.

There was nothing sharp, aside from a razor, and smashing that to get it out of the plastic holding would do more damage to his hands than the device. The mirror, then. He picked up a glass holding the Batman's toothbrush, made of some kind of heavy ceramic, and brought it to the mirror, again and again until the sink was littered with shards. The largest of them he took, dropping back to the floor as he brought it against the anklet, doing damage to nothing but his own skin until the Bat broke down the door and grabbed his hands.

* * *

By this point, Bruce had accepted that his job was never going to be easy. That acceptance didn't make it any less horrifying to break the bathroom door's lock, expecting to find Crane sulking, and instead seeing his captive mutilating himself with the remains of Bruce's mirror, trying to gain freedom.

"Stop!"

He gave no indication that he'd heard, continuing until Bruce dropped to his knees—getting cut himself by the slivers on the floor—and grabbed his wrists. There was blood over everything, both from the cuts he'd made to his leg trying to get the tracking device off, and his hands from clutching the glass so tightly. He was still holding it and refused to let go until Bruce made his grip tight enough to force Crane to drop it.

The second it was out of his hands, he began to struggle again. Whether that was to regain the glass—though he must know by now that it served no purpose—or just to get the hands off him, Bruce wasn't sure. The man looked every bit as wild as he had while un-medicated, hyperventilating and fighting like a rabid animal.

"Jonathan!" Using his first name probably didn't help matters in the least, but thankfully, he seemed too worked up to even register it. "Stop."

"_Off_!" The scream was one of the loudest Bruce had ever heard, and it made his ears ring as badly as the blow had. "Get _off_!"

Wonderful. There was a psychotic criminal in his home who knew his secret, and now appeared to be going through some sort of break down, shrieking at ear-piercing levels, and bloodying himself up, which was, given Bruce's luck, going to lead to infection on top of everything else. "Calm down. I'm trying to help you."

"_Let go_!"

Of course being calm himself and clearly stating things didn't help at all. He hadn't really expected it to, and yet the failure was every bit as disappointing as if he had. He sighed again and tried to deal with things one at a time. "I'm going to clean out the cuts so you won't get sick. All right?"

Crane gave no sign of hearing, or acknowledging the world around him aside from struggling to get away from Bruce, but he noticed when he was dropped into the bath and Bruce turned on the water. And it all went downhill from there.

* * *

_Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?_

Jonathan had thought he was struggling as hard as he possibly could to get away from the Batman, as he'd thought he'd been giving it his all to cut the anklet off of his leg. He hadn't. He'd forgotten what giving it his all was, and dimly recognized that this was probably the hardest he'd ever fought since he was a child, still young and small enough to be held down and tortured by that old bitch like this. Just like this.

_Do you believe in God the Father?_

It didn't matter that he was still getting air. Too much air, giving how often and deeply he was breathing between cries. It didn't matter that the water was only touching his hands and legs and that the drain was open, so what came out of the faucet wasn't even staying in. None of that mattered. Any sense of reason he might have had about the situation was long gone, buried under the flood of panic.

_Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?_

And with the panic came all the horrible memories that he'd managed to suppress of that torture, the memories that he'd fought to bury every time he was caught in the rain, or each time the neighborhood kids had tried throwing him in the lake—oh God, the time they _had_, and he couldn't even _swim_— the thing that he'd fought so hard to forget and almost had, to the point where he could close his eyes in a shower and listen to the rhythm of the water and pretend it was something else, pretend he wasn't feeling the water, just the warmth and the rhythm and not even need to imagine he was somewhere else because he'd gotten past all that.

_Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit_?

Only he hadn't gotten past it, and that had never been more clear than it was now, thrashing and screaming against the liquid form of hell raining all over him while his most hated enemy held him there and made him suffer, made him go through this agony that was supposed to be blessed, the suffering he'd been forced to endure over and over and over again when it was only supposed to happen once, and it shouldn't even have happened _then_, and he couldn't even tell where he _was _anymore, or whether the water was over his head or not, or which hateful bastard was holding him down and making him go through it.

_In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit._

His screams had gone past words and into animalistic sounds, increasingly broken by sobs and gasps for air, burning his throat the way water did after it was coughed back up, and it wasn't until he was going hoarse and had burned too much energy to fight, too much energy to do anything but lie there and let the agony take him, that it stopped.

_Amen._

* * *

Bruce was too preoccupied at first with the task at hand to notice the screaming.

It wasn't that he didn't realize the sounds had gotten louder, or the fighting wilder, but he blocked it out. Controlling focus was something the League of Shadows had stressed, had beaten into him, both figuratively and literally. And focus, while vital in a fight, was useful in other tasks as well. Such as having a conversation while ignoring the paparazzi that seemed to appear wherever he was having a social night out, or making himself listen to a board meeting after only an hour of sleep—though he tended to fail at that one, still—or cleaning up the psychopath in his bathtub. Digging tiny pieces of glass from a struggling man's hands and legs seemed more important at that moment than focusing on the nature of the struggling.

That was, until he got a good look at Crane once he'd finished pulling the glass out. And by that point, the screaming had stopped, replacing by hoarse whimpers and broken sobs. And then it only took Bruce a split second to realize that something was seriously wrong. "Jonathan?"

He flinched, but didn't otherwise react.

"Jonathan? Are you all right?"

He didn't so much as move this time, only stared down at his hands and cried to himself.

"Jonathan?" He lifted the man out of the bath, ignoring the weak struggles and the water dripping from his clothes and onto the tile. "You're okay. Jonathan?"

Jonathan responded by shivering violently and vomiting onto Bruce's lap.

* * *

Michael Caine's personal backstory for Alfred dictates that he was a SAS sergeant in the British Armed Forces.

Chloro-trifluoromenthane is a chemical that will eat through asbestos, sand, wood, and test engineers. Yes, test engineers. Someone actually reported that on a list of things it'll destroy.

As far as I know, Jonathan's hatred of water is my own invention and not from the comics. The religious quotes are parts of a Lutheran baptism ritual. I don't think Crane's great-grandmother was Lutheran, but that's the version I know and I think baptisms tend to be similar.


	12. Contact

AN: I meant to have this chapter out last night, but I was unhappy with it and it ended up being re-written. Sorry for the delay.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Sitting there covered in Jonathan's vomit, it had never been more apparent to Bruce that he was completely inept when it came to caring for the mentally ill.

That wasn't to say that he didn't deal with those of unsound mind on a regular basis; for every handful of criminals motivated only by greed or desperation to be found in Gotham, there was at least one supervillain driven by a force that only truly made sense in their own minds. But apprehending someone out of touch with reality and being responsible for that person on a daily basis were two very separate things. On the streets, the focus was on getting everyone out of the situation alive and as unharmed as he could manage. The opposition he encountered there came in the form of weapons or beatings or overly-elaborate death traps. It was only on the rare occasion when defeat sent a criminal into a breakdown as opposed to a rage that he had to deal with anything psychological. And then it was only for long enough to deliver said criminal to the authorities.

Here, however, the psychological aspect became vastly more important, and given the three psychotic breaks that had occurred since taking the Joker and Jonathan into the Batcave, Bruce was actively horrible at it. That wasn't surprising, considering that his usual methods in dealing with the villains involved inducing panic and, more often than not, resorting to violence, but the justification didn't change the fact that he was supposed to be the sworn protector of all the city, not just the more pleasant parts, and sworn protectors didn't go around pushing people into become panicked, self-mutilating, vomiting wrecks. In theory, anyway.

The only comfort he could gain from the situation was the fact that, unlike when he'd pushed the Joker over the edge, this time it had been unintentional. And that comfort was small enough to fit in the eye of a needle. It was action that mattered, not intent, as Rachel had told him, and those were words he'd kept close to heart ever since. And right now the needed action was to deal with this latest problem before it could escalate, so he pushed his guilt aside as best he could and focused his energy on the task at hand.

Something had set Jonathan off; that much was obvious. He hadn't been this out of it when he'd run into the bathroom. He hadn't even been this badly off when Bruce had broken the lock and stopped him from trying to remove the tracker. Whatever it was that had sent him over the edge, Bruce needed to get him away from that. In a way, that was what had brought the Joker around; seeing Bruce as Batman and not Bruce Wayne had restored what little stability he had. That "cure" obviously wouldn't carry over to this situation, but the principle was the same.

The ankle bracelet could have been what pushed him too far, but Bruce doubted it. His reaction to it had been violent and panicked, yes, but there was still logic to the madness at that point. Slamming the alarm clock against Bruce's head, locking the door, and trying to cut it off had been desperate attempts that a rational person would have realized would fail, but they had also been productive, in a way. There was some accomplishment there, however small, unlike the panic attack and subsequent stupor. Maybe having his last chance of removing the thing taken away had been the breaking point, but then the fit should have started when Bruce took the glass out of his hands.

It could have been the pain from having the glass removed from his skin. That had to hurt, maybe even more than slicing himself up with it. Still, this was a man who'd fired a nail gun into his own hand and reacted with little more than silent tears and the occasional gasp of pain. Not to mention the fact that he seemed to use pain as a grounding method in times of emotional turmoil. If anything, having someone else digging around in his injuries would have calmed him down, unless it was Bruce's presence that had been the catalyst.

But Jonathan had put up with him alone and lucid for a while now, and it was Bruce as Batman that he had a horrible history with. Unlike the Joker, Jonathan surely acknowledged that Bruce Wayne and Batman were the same person, but he seemed so out of it at the moment that it was unclear if he even recognized Bruce, let alone had the mental facilities to understand an alter ego at the moment.

What did that leave? If it wasn't Bruce, the pain, or the loss of a chance at freedom, the only thing left was being put in—the bath. It struck him just as hard as the alarm clock had; one of those things that should have been obvious but wasn't until it was staring him dead in the face, and even then it took several minutes longer than it should have. To be fair, Jonathan's earlier actions that had hinted at a fear of water—his expression when Bruce had sarcastically suggested dumping a bucket of the stuff on him and his terse reply when asked why he hadn't given the catatonic Joker a bath as opposed to a shower—hadn't been the focus of the conversations, and hadn't seemed important at the time. Still, the fact that the fit had started the instant he'd turned on the water should have occurred to him as soon as it happened. Apparently, the stress of having an enemy captive in his home was affecting more than just his blood pressure.

Well, while decline in reasoning was something that needed taking care of, now wasn't the time. The important thing at the moment was to keep from doing any more damage and trying to reverse what he'd already done. And changing to pants that weren't covered in vomit. That was at the top of his to-do list, actually.

He stood, reflecting on how Alfred would definitely refuse to wash these—or mop the floor—before remembering that they were dry-clean only anyway. Bruce supposed that whatever stains remained by the time the cleaners got a hold of them wouldn't seem out of place for a billionaire known to attend wild parties. Not that he made a habit of drinking, obviously, considering his line of work, but the illusion of doing so could come in handy. No one suspected Bruce Wayne's sudden disappearances if they assumed he was passed out on a couch somewhere or in the bathroom retching up everything he'd consumed in the past week.

He glanced at Jonathan, still huddled and shaking on the floor. He didn't seem capable of sitting up straight at the moment, let alone making a break for it, so Bruce took the risk of crossing to the bathroom door to retrieve his robe. When he returned, sufficiently covered and no longer drenched in stomach acids, the man didn't respond. Bruce knelt down beside him. "Jonathan?"

He brought his eyes up to meet Bruce's. That was something, anyway. It was more than the Joker had been able to manage when he'd broken and more than Jonathan had been capable of before, under the psychosis and sedatives. He was still lacking either the drive or the mental capabilities to get up and clean himself off—aside from the water, he'd managed to be sick on himself as well, even though he hadn't eat in hours and couldn't have had much in his system to start with—but at least he hadn't completely lost touch with reality.

"Jonathan? Can you understand me?"

He didn't look away, but he didn't answer, either. It was entirely possible, Bruce supposed, for Jonathan to be seeing Bruce as someone or something else completely. There was no way of knowing what his current mental state was apart from speaking with him, and speech seemed beyond him right now. Bruce chose to assume that Jonathan was coherent enough to understand him.

"Do you want to get dried off?"

He hadn't expected a response. But Jonathan nodded before he'd even finished speaking, so vigorously Bruce wouldn't be at all surprised if his actions gave him whiplash. It seemed his hatred of water was even stronger than his aversion to accepting help. Possibly even strong that his animosity for Bruce, assuming that he knew who Bruce was at the moment.

"Okay. Can you stand up?"

He could, albeit once he was up, he was had all the stability of a newborn fawn and would have fallen over at least three times on the way back into the bedroom had Bruce not been there to upright him. Hopefully the shaking and lack of coordination were aftereffects of adrenaline, and not a sign that he'd managed to damage something internally during the panic attack. He'd certainly been struggling hard enough.

In addition, the act of standing and walking unsupported—for the most part—drained whatever energy he'd had in reserve, and by the time Bruce got him onto the bed, he'd stopped moving entirely, aside from his eyes, which still darted around, tracking Bruce's movements, mostly. He was either unable or unwilling to dry himself off, or remove his soaked clothes, which left the entire thing up to Bruce.

It wasn't that they hadn't been through this before. When Jonathan had been under heavy sedation before his meds had leveled out, he'd been incapable of doing much of anything for himself. Someone too drugged to do anything beyond lying there and sleeping obviously lacked the coordination necessary to remove a sock, let alone operate a zipper. The fact that Bruce had been doing this sort of thing for over a week now didn't make it any less disconcerting. Having their interactions go from "dodge the fear toxin and knock unconscious" to "make him raise his arms up so I can get the shirt off" was a leap he wasn't sure he'd ever adjust to.

And if all that wasn't enough, Jonathan was far smaller and slenderer than Bruce had been in years, so the act of navigating his limbs through any article of clothing was much more complicated than it had any reason to be. He really needed to get some things in the man's size. Of course, knowing Jonathan, he'd find fault with fitting clothing as he did with everything else and make Bruce regret ever trying in the first place, but at least this sort of thing wouldn't take as long.

He'd just finished rolling back the sleeves of the shirt to the wrists when Jonathan's hand shot out in the first move of his own accord since sitting down, and grabbed Bruce's own hand, tightly enough to make his knuckles go white. For a moment, Bruce could only stare, stunned.

"Jonathan?"

He didn't respond, eyes locked on their entwined hands. It was the only time Bruce could think of that the man had made voluntary psychical contact with him, and it was almost as unnerving as his episode in the bathroom had been.

"Jonathan?" He knelt down until he was at his captive's eye level. Jonathan didn't look up. "Do you want to go back to your room?"

Jonathan gave the faintest of tugs on Bruce's hand, as if trying to make him sit. This had to be a complete psychotic break, then. Jonathan Crane would never put himself near Batman, costumed or not, of his own free will while he was in his "right" mind. Wonderful. "Guess I'm not going into work today."

Jonathan shifted his hand just enough to interlock their fingers.

* * *

He needed contact.

Honestly, he needed far more than that, chiefly to have Scarecrow back, and freedom directly below that. An awareness of his surroundings would be nice as well, but Jonathan got the distinct impression that, for whatever reason, understanding where he was at the moment would only make him all the more miserable. His mind seemed to have shut down when it came to processing most stimuli from the outside world, which he took as a sign that experiencing much more on top of the water torture could very likely do him serious damage.

The water, he remembered with perfect clarity. Horrible and cold, with hands keeping him pinned, threatening to drown him, make him feel that hideous burning sensation in his lungs and throat while his vision sparked in and out of blackness, his body forcing him to inhale though his mind knew doing so would almost certainly kill him. It wasn't an experience he'd gone through often as a child, but the times he had had been every bit the hell his great-grandmother was so fond of telling him he'd burn in. He no longer feared eternal suffering, but the fear of drowning seemed to have become more vivid as the years went by, if anything.

The panic the water caused had also brought back the hallucinations. When he'd woken up this morning—it seemed hours ago, now—the nightmare images that had haunted his every waking moment for so long had been all but gone, see-through and silent; more of an accent than a pattern. However, stress did a wonder for restoring the damn things, and the sheer, unadulterated terror the water caused had undone the progress in a heartbeat. He still couldn't hear or feel the crows tearing around the room, thankfully, but they were back in full color.

So all in all, the fact that fear had caused his mind to shut down to the point where he couldn't recognize or force himself to acknowledge his surroundings wasn't so bad. Comforting, in a way. He was content to ignore the world around him until the world became less scary.

What he could not ignore, however, was that there was someone touching him.

To say that Scarecrow could touch him wouldn't be accurate. His other half didn't have a separate physical presence, after all, and even when he took control of the body it didn't count, because the body was neither Jonathan's nor Scarecrow's. Jonathan had had sole control of it until the exposure to his fear toxin, but it had once he'd adjusted to sharing it, he'd never viewed the control as something Scarecrow had taken from him. It seemed natural. After all, they occupied the same mental space, so why not share the physical as well?

But despite the inability to touch, there had always been a form of contact with Scarecrow. Jonathan had been able to feel his presence, even when his other half was sleeping, being quiet, or actively trying to ignore a situation they found themselves in. That was what made this disappearance so horrible; that presence was gone. If Scarecrow was just being quiet, that would be one thing. Here, he was completely gone, and it was hellish.

He needed that contact to function. He'd never been without it for as long as he could remember and he doubted he could go without it now. He'd coped for the past few days, but if he had to put up with it for much longer, it would start tearing him to shreds from the inside out. It wasn't a want, but an actual, physical need.

And when he'd felt hands on him, it had been an echo of the contact he so desperately craved.

A weak echo, to say the least. Barely there. Physical contact was no match for a mental connection. It was like running out of coffee creamer and trying to make do with skim milk, or giving a cancer patient aspirin instead of chemotherapy. It could hardly be called satisfying and he doubted it would be useful for a prolonged period of time.

But it was contact, and the only contact he had.

He tried not to focus on the person giving that contact. He was still too distracted by birds and fear and everything else to acknowledge who was touching him, and he got the feeling that he wouldn't like the answer if he knew. No one he tolerated would have put him in such a situation to begin with. Whoever this was, he or she was helping him to somewhat cope, and he didn't have it in him to complain for the moment.

When the contact ended, he reached out and took the person's hand, calloused and powerful and warm, into his own, as tightly as he could to keep the connection from being broken. It wasn't Scarecrow. It wasn't even the right sort of contact. But it did help to assuage his fear, if only barely. And anyway, it was the best he could get.


	13. Georgia On My Mind

AN: So I'm working all day tomorrow, and my sister's visiting Thursday through Saturday, which will probably throw the updating schedule out of whack. Sorry!

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

They didn't sit on the bed for long before Bruce decided to relocate to the kitchen. Jonathan had not only not eaten this morning but also vomited out what little had been in his system, and Bruce had forgotten to feed himself in as well. Not that he ate much breakfast to begin with—if he didn't burn so many calories each night, he'd be the type of person to skip it all together—but the experience today had been more than a bit draining. And if something was enough to drain him, he couldn't imagine the effect it must be having on Jonathan.

Getting Jonathan to eat took far longer than it should have. Not that it was hard to convince him to eat what was placed in front of him, but he refused to let go of Bruce's hand throughout the process. And it was his right hand that was interlocked with Bruce's, so that made things even slower. At least he ate and kept it down.

Alfred had the decency not to comment, for once, though the look on his face as he watched the two in the kitchen suggested that he was enjoying the comedic value of the situation much more than Bruce did.

After that, they'd ended up in front of one of the manor's televisions, as it was clear Jonathan wasn't letting go any time soon and he didn't feel like returning to either of their rooms just to sit there and stare at the wall for hours on end. Bruce was watching GCN at the moment, because if he couldn't attend one job, he at least wanted to stay informed for the other. If Jonathan objected to the station, he'd made no indication of it and was in no position to do so now, having fallen asleep.

Having the man sleep on him was almost as disturbing as his breakdown had been. It was ridiculous. After all Bruce had been through, from his parents' deaths to the Joker's sadistic attacks on the city, and every other little horror in between, having Jonathan Crane leaning on him while unconscious shouldn't have made so much as a blip on the radar. Or been within a mile of the radar to begin with. Considering how terrifying the man could be—Bruce wasn't sure he'd ever get the image of the bat flying from the mouth of that god-awful mask out of his head—this should have been nightmare retardant, if anything.

It wasn't.

There was something completely unsettling about having a villain act less as if he was about to threaten innocent lives for his own gain and more as if he was about to ask for a glass of water and a reading of _Goodnight Moon_, no matter how hard Bruce tried to ignore it. It had been one thing when Jonathan was drugged and completely out of his mind. But when Bruce wasn't sure how much of the world around him Jonathan understood, it was an entirely new playing field, and one that was uneven and rocky. It was similar to the experience of seeing the Joker without his makeup; it added an uncomfortably intimate and human side to their interactions.

The fact that this was all Bruce's fault didn't help either.

In his sleep, Jonathan shifted slightly. The hand holding Bruce's had relaxed enough to release him as its owner lost consciousness, but it had stayed in the vicinity, and his fingers jerked, lightly gripping Bruce's sleeve. He wondered if moving would wake Jonathan up and decided not to risk it.

"We're not making a habit of this, you know."

Jonathan didn't respond. If suggestion really did work on sleeping people, there were no outward signs of it, apparently. Not that he'd expected an answer. He wasn't even sure if he'd been talking to Jonathan or himself. He couldn't allow himself to be too drawn into Jonathan Crane's human side. He'd made that mistake with the Joker—the Joker had given it all he had to make things deeply personal, but still—and lost a captive as a result. Crane was a person, yes, but that person was also a deeply twisted maniac who had gladly tortured others to benefit himself, who'd had no moral objection to threatening the entire city for the sake of wealth. He was entirely out of his mind and needed to be locked up, both for the safety of himself and everyone else in Gotham City. And he would be, as soon as Bruce figured out how to protect his secret. The man needed professional help, not the Batman's pity.

And on top of that, Crane had made it clear time and time again that he did not appreciate Bruce's attempts at kindness or decency or any other positive emotion. He was not only ungrateful, but also flagrantly scornful of Bruce's efforts, and he took every advantage he had as a chance at escape. Expecting him to appreciate or even understand any attempt of Bruce's to treat him like a human being would be insane, as experience had taught him time and time again that it was never going to happen.

It would make this job so much simpler if Jonathan could.

But then, if the Joker experience was anything to go by, Jonathan would only use it to his advantage even if he could comprehend it. So the whole thing would be an exercise in futility. Wonderful. Damn the Joker for getting them into this mess. The next time the Batman caught him, he was going to snap the clown's neck.

In a way that wouldn't kill him, of course. Which could never be as satisfying, but Bruce was sure he'd be able to cope.

* * *

The air in Georgia was different than the air of Gotham.

Jonathan knew he was in Georgia before he opened his eyes. The air in either had horrible humidity; Georgia, because all the southeastern states did, and Gotham because it was surrounded by water. But the air in Gotham held scents like gasoline and smog and all the things that came with city life, whereas Georgia—at least, the rural areas where he'd grown up—had the scent of grass and fields and every allergen known to modern science. He hadn't been in Georgian air since he was old enough to attend college, but he'd spent a great and traumatic amount of his life there and it wasn't something the mind forgot, buried in the subconscious though it may be.

He opened his eyes.

He was on the floor of an empty room, furnished only by cobwebs and dust. He didn't need furniture to recognize his surroundings, however. Even with the plain white walls, now yellowing from age and neglect, and the unremarkable wood floor, he recognized his childhood bedroom. God knew he'd spent enough time on the floor in here anyway, either in prayer or hiding forbidden books throughout the room. Besides, smell was the sense that tied longest to memory, and he hadn't forgotten the scent of this house either.

Jonathan stood. He was on the spot where the bed used to be, but there was no sign of it anymore, not even spots clear of dust where the frame would have touched the floor. The dresser was gone as well, and upon examination, the closet was empty. On a whim, he lifted the loose floorboard in the closet that he'd hidden books under ever since his grandmother had found his hiding place under the bed—and accused him of masturbating to _Ulysses_; _that _had been a miserable night—and found the space beneath to be as empty as the rest of the room.

As the bedroom held nothing but memories he'd rather not dwell on, Jonathan stepped into the hallway.

The hall had fallen into disrepair as had the bedroom, but the cobwebs here were thicker, the floor creaking with each step as though it could give way at any second. Given that the house—more of a manor, really—had been wasting away along with the family name since before Jonathan's birth, he supposed the collapse of the floor wasn't unlikely. Probable, even.

He moved faster, though not at a run, as he didn't trust the floor to sustain that kind of force. Around him there were shadows, dark flickers at the edge of his vision that he didn't dare turn his head to see properly. Memories remained long after inhabitants or their belongings, and this place held more twisted memories than he'd care to face _with _Scarecrow. Without him, it was all he could do not to panic, and his heart was pounding at double its resting rate by the time he half-ran down the stairs and forced the front door open. It took far more effort than any door should, as the hinges had rusted and the wood of the frame seemed to have warped over time. But it did open, eventually, and Jonathan did run, then, until he was far from the house, at the start of one of the fields.

The fields. God, he'd forgotten how much he hated them. If the house was a symbol of all the intellectual and spiritual abuse he'd endured through his life, the fields were the manifestation of the physical. Not that he hadn't been beaten inside, but this was the place where he'd toiled day after day from the time he was old enough to wield a shovel or scythe, while his great-grandmother had watched and never so much as lifted a finger to aid him. And of course the corn here looked right at the harvest, as if in mockery of the memories resurfacing. Hallucination or dream or whatever this was, it wasn't welcome.

Jonathan was beginning to reconsider his thoughts about the existence of hell when he caught sight of the other figure in the field. His companion was far away, very far away—if Jonathan had focused on the rest of his surroundings, he would have realized that the manor and chapel and everything else on his family's land had gone, replaced by endless field—but not far away enough to keep Jonathan from seeing that the figure was twisting around on the scarecrow pole.

Heart soaring with more hope than he could ever remember feeling, Jonathan ran. He ran until his lungs and sides burned and his legs threatened to give out beneath him, and kept running. The ground below was rocky and hard, and the stalks on either side smacked against his body, but he ran despite it, not stopping until he reached his destination. "Scarecrow!"

The figure was writhing too much for Jonathan to get a good look at his features—he had a horrible, boneless way of moving that was unlike any motion a human would make—but he recognized the voice. "Jonathan?" It was as hopeful as his own, and the sound of it brought tears to his eyes.

He blinked the tears away, staring up at the nails through his friend's wrists that kept him pinned. "Do you need my help?"

"Your help," Scarecrow said, now every bit as forlorn as it had been hopeful, "is no longer a luxury I possess." Before Jonathan could question the words, Scarecrow's body gave a violent jerk, accompanied by a ripping sound, and he fell to the ground, nails still in place on the pole.

"Scarecrow!" He knelt beside his other half, taking in the holes through either wrist, straw emerging from the ragged flesh as opposed to blood. It was all he had time to take in before Scarecrow was sitting upright, arms around him as tightly as they would go.

"Jonathan. My Jonathan." One hand was stroking his hair now, and Jonathan noted that it lacked the warmth of human skin. "My Jonathan."

"Scarecrow." He hugged back, then pulled away to get a good look at the other's appearance. They were almost identical, but Scarecrow's skin was too smooth, too flawless to be human. Aside from the scars. He didn't have Jonathan's scars, but rather deep gashes running through his face where the stitches were on their burlap mask in the waking world. His hair and clothing were covered with straw, as though he'd rolled in it, and his eyes lacked pupils and sclera. They were the same blue as Jonathan's, but all over, and they lacked the liquid shine of a human eye, their glisten more resembling mother-of-pearl, like a button.

Through the skin above and below his lips ran the same thick black thread that ran through the mouth of the burlap mask, but his was loose enough to allow speech.

Jonathan had never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.

"Scarecrow." He hugged again, tighter. "Why did you leave? I need you. I cannot be alone." He felt moisture on his face that carried the scent of rainwater. It took a moment to realize that he was feeling Scarecrow's tears.

"Please understand, my Jonathan." It was Scarecrow who pulled away this time, running his cold hand over Jonathan's face. When he spoke, straw fell out of his mouth from between the stitches. "You are the most important thing in the world to me."

"Then why did you leave me?" His own tears were on his face now, and Scarecrow wiped them away.

"Why did you listen to the serpent? Why did you place your faith in another?"

Jonathan felt guilt twist inside of him, a sharp pain that brought new tears. He held his other half tightly enough to cause himself pain, and felt Scarecrow do the same. He would be content to stay here forever, he thought, memories aside, if it meant keeping his friend. "I—I was a fool. I will never question you again, I promise. Please."

"It is not that simple, my Jonathan. Remember Halloween?"

How could he forget? It was etched into his mind as clearly as it had been on Halloween night when the Joker had beaten him onto Death's doorstep; his life only saved by the Batman's intervention. How he'd lost all rational judgment in his anger, and how Scarecrow had fled to avoid the coming pain. He nodded.

"My Jonathan. My dear one. You are my bridge to the world." His smile was small and sad and did not reach his eyes. "One does not cross a broken bridge."

"But I am not broken. Not now."

Scarecrow untangled one hand from the hug and used it to lift the hem of Jonathan's pant leg. There were slashes on his ankle, deep and wide.

"I need you." He felt the break in his voice. "I need you to make it better."

"If one falls from a broken bridge," said Scarecrow, "both are in need of repair. My Jonathan, my love, I cannot cross. Not until more water has passed beneath."

Jonathan could see the logic to it. He did not want to see it, but he did. And he saw beyond it, as well. This was not only a move to protect them, but a punishment. He would feel the other's presence if it were just a distance. But there was a wall in the distance, towering and thick and built as a reminder. Because he had eaten from the forbidden tree, and he would suffer for turning away. "Do not go."

Scarecrow's tears were on his face again, and he felt lips brush against his cheek. They were cold, and accompanied by thread and straw. He would have given anything to keep the sensation from ending, but it was gone less than thirty seconds after it began. In its place, there was whispering in his ear. "I will not go until you wake."

He opened his mouth to offer a thousand and one protests, only to have Scarecrow's hand cover it, gently. And left with no other recourse, he held on to his other half with all of his strength, resolving not to let go until consciousness forced him away.

* * *

AN: _Goodnight Moon _is a children's book.

The _Ulysses _bit comes from the comics. His great-grandmother accuses him of getting off on the works of James Joyce, of all people. Granted, I suppose it's possible to get off on anything, but given that even literature professors and critics still can't figure a good deal of Joyce's work out, I imagine it's very difficult to do.


	14. Stability

AN: So the fantastic Komman fanart-ed the last chapter. You can see it here: www. necessariusmalum. net / img/ Dontletmorningcome. jpg. You know, after having gotten over a thousand reviews, when I combine all my fics, and having numerous works of art done for them, it really shouldn't still faze me that I have fans, and yet, I'm always pleasantly surprised whenever I think about it.

Sorry about the delay and the shortness of this chapter!

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Dream Scarecrow was a hell of a lot more eloquent than his waking counterpart.

Jonathan was somewhere between sleep and consciousness; still too out of it to open his eyes, but awake enough for the dream to have faded, giving a muted reproduction of the pain he'd felt when Scarecrow had abandoned him in the first place. It felt as if something had been ripped out of him; something he could physically function without but that had left a gaping void inside. How he'd managed to go through insanity while abandoned like this, he had no idea. He was on the verge of breaking down now, and he wasn't even fully awake yet.

He was awake enough to realize that his other half was being a complete bastard, however.

That last dream—at least, toward the end—had been far more straightforward than his others, which he took as a sign that he'd been speaking to the real Scarecrow, and not a manifestation of his longing for his companion back. He'd never known Scarecrow to influence dreams, but if the other could take control of the body, there was no reason he couldn't sway the subconscious as well. Which meant that Scarecrow was awake and watching, and able to make contact.

And aside from the dream—which was the equivalent of taking away a child's kitten only to let them visit it for an hour or so later—he hadn't made contact. Because he wanted Jonathan to suffer.

Sure, he'd had his excuse about stability. An excuse that, had he said it in real life, wouldn't have been the articulate metaphor of the bridge but something more along the lines of "get your shit together." And in a way, it worked as an explanation for his absence. Jonathan hadn't been exactly stable when Scarecrow had come back the last time, but he hadn't been having crying, vomiting fits and shouting matches with his arch-nemesis either. Strange that Scarecrow would have such a need for solidity considering that he was the less neurotic of the two, but they had more in common than Jonathan was willing to admit under ordinary circumstances. And he'd always been the one who comforted Jonathan after whatever misery his other half had experienced, so his desire to have things under control wasn't that bizarre.

At any rate, why it was so important to Scarecrow didn't matter, because it was nothing more than a half-truth being used to cover up the real reason: punishment. And the only reason Jonathan had entertained it for more than a second was because he'd been asleep at the time.

The fact of the matter was that Scarecrow was angry. Angry enough to let that anger overcome his usual habit of protecting Jonathan in situations like this. He was pissed at the Joker for making them go through this, at the Batman for keeping them here, and most of all at Jonathan, for ignoring him yet again. For brushing the one who had the—comparatively—intelligent ideas aside for no good reason. Because he'd trusted _the Joker_ more.

Looking back, that _had _been a horrible decision. Even if the Joker was a compelling speaker—and there was no doubt that he was, disturbingly so—trusting him over his _other half_, trusting anything the man suggested to work in way that would benefit Jonathan, was akin to sticking his hand in a wood-chipper and expecting things to turn out all right. Which was about what his sanity had gone through.

He couldn't fault Scarecrow for being furious about it. The anger was perfectly justified; Jonathan wouldn't think of arguing on that point. It wasn't the anger he had issue with. Actually, he was used to that. Scarecrow was on par with the Joker or worse when it came to controlling his temper—the time he'd smashed a plate over the Clown Prince of Crime's head was a shining example—and Jonathan had been mentally shouted at more times than he could count over the years, painfully and for extended periods. That, he was used to.

The abandonment, on the other hand, Jonathan was not as willing to accept.

It wasn't as if he couldn't see the reasoning behind it. Scarecrow knew that Jonathan could not function without him, at least not well or for long without getting hurt or breaking down, or both. So he'd chosen to leave to remind Jonathan of exactly how much he needed his other half, to ensure that Jonathan would never disregard him again when he did return.

It was brilliant. Coming from anyone else, it would be psychological torture, but it was nonetheless brilliant. And he knew it had to be tearing Scarecrow apart as well, watching all the suffering while forcing himself not to intervene.

That didn't make his decision any more sympathetic, or Jonathan any less hurt. But it did make the loneliness gut-wrenching enough to equal the anger. Enough to make him try to force himself into stability, even in a situation such as this, in which becoming a complete wreck could never be more justified.

Jonathan became aware that he was starting to fully wake up. He looked forward to _that _about as much as a root canal without the use of Novocain. Without the haze of sleep that made the idea of achieving stability in Wayne Manor seem plausible, he started to wonder if he wouldn't be better off somehow forcing himself into a coma than making the effort. He saw Scarecrow in his dreams, after all, and doing that much damage to himself had to be easier than achieving a state of calm in his current surroundings.

He could hear a heartbeat; feel the sort of warmth against his body that didn't come from blankets or a mattress, but the body of another living thing. For a moment, he didn't question it, only enjoyed the comfort. It was still a far cry from having Scarecrow back, but it was better than nothing.

Then his brain caught up with his body, and he bolted up, eyes opening as wide as they would go and then some.

The Batman stared back at him, his expression like that of a person who'd gotten very close to a wild animal and was just now realizing that it might run or bite. He would have been insulted, if he hadn't been occupied with his own self-disgust. This was every bit as revolting as the mornings where he used to wake to find himself leaning up against the Joker, before they'd started the sad imitation of a relationship that he hadn't realized was an imitation until it was too late. God, how he hated his body and its subconscious reactions. He didn't care if it was a natural impulse to seek out warmth; it was sick.

"Are you all right?"

His tone was much the same as his expression, as if he was trying not to frighten the wild thing away. It was degrading and infuriating and it brought to mind roughly one trillion angry and sardonic responses he wanted to shout, if not to frighten or anger the Bat then at least to make him regret asking.

But that wouldn't bring things any closer to stable.

He bit his tongue. Literally, and if he'd done it any harder, it would have drawn blood.

"Jonathan?"

He hadn't tried controlling what he said in a long time, not since his less-than-legal activities had been discovered and there was no point in pretending to get along with people anymore. He'd forgotten just how much he hated it. It had taken him the better part of his life to figure out what wouldn't get him in trouble to say in the first place, and he'd never fully adjusted to not blurting it out.

Common sense was not something he'd even been familiar with.

"Jonathan?"

He forced himself to nod, becoming suddenly and entirely focused on staring down at his lap. He wasn't wearing the clothes he'd had on when he'd been thrown into that godforsaken bath. Oh, wonderful. Absolutely fantastic. As if wearing the Bat's clothes wasn't humiliating enough, there was now the terrible realization that the man must have dressed him. It was one thing when the nurses at Arkham did it—one _horrible _thing—but this had just crossed the line from miserable to flat-out hell.

"Do you need anything?"

He glanced at the Batman out of the corner of his eye, noting that the man's pants weren't the same pair he'd had on before. It was puzzling for a second until he remembered exactly what had happened when he'd gotten out of the bath, and then he smiled very slightly, in spite of himself. Hopefully, those pants would be ruined forever. Not that it mattered; the Batman had enough money to wear a different pair of pants every day for the rest of his life without making even a tiny dent in his wealth, but it was still satisfying.

"Jonathan?"

He didn't quite sigh, but he exhaled with far more force than necessary. Could the Bat just not take the hint that he didn't want to talk? The pity was back in the man's voice again, and it made Jonathan's blood boil. He clenched his hands against the fabric of his pants and once again fought back the overwhelming urge to say something that would certainly lead nowhere good. Why wasn't Scarecrow back yet? He'd displayed more self-control in these last few seconds than he'd ever used in his entire life.

Maybe if he just didn't say anything, it would make it clear how much he did not want the Batman pretending to be concerned for him.

There was a hand on his shoulder, suddenly. _God _damn _it. _Why did people feel that they were allowed to touch him? Just because he'd fallen asleep on top of the man and initiated contact earlier—and remembering that made his face flame, and made him bite hard enough to really draw blood—did _not _mean he wanted to be touched.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

He didn't trust himself not to hit the man if he raised his arm to push the Bat's hand off, so he moved to the other side to end the contact, nodding tightly as he did.

He could feel the Batman's eyes on him, and it was as infuriating as it was unnerving. He didn't want to be touched, or pitied, or otherwise looked after. Why was that so hard to understand? If the Bat really wanted to make up for what he'd done, he ought to do it by leaving Crane alone. But of course that wasn't about to happen, because that just wouldn't be miserable enough.

"Do you need anything?"

_Besides you shutting up?_ Or freedom, or most of all, Scarecrow. He shook his head, wanting to ignore the man entirely but wanting even more not to be touched again.

There was a long pause, during which he could feel the Batman's eyes boring into him. The Bat finally broke it by standing. "I'm going to the kitchen. Let me know if you want something."

He didn't respond, and for once, the Batman didn't touch him. He only waited and, upon seeing that an answer wasn't forthcoming, instructed Crane to find him if he needed anything. Crane tasted blood again, his hands clenched tightly enough to hurt.

He pulled up his pant leg as the Batman walked out, staring at the GPS device and the bandages beneath it. It was sure to be waterproof, and freeze-proof, and Any-Other-Thing-Jonathan-Could-Get-His-Hands-On-To-Destroy-It-With-proof. Which meant escape was no longer an option. The Batman would hunt him down long before he procured a vehicle and got out of the device's range.

There was nothing left to do but make the best of the situation until he figured out an escape, or until Scarecrow returned.

Trying to make the best of this was like trying to make the best of chronic pain.

_Scarecrow?_

Nothing. The wall between them was wide and thick as ever, the space that Scarecrow usually occupied empty as ever.

_Please. I'm sorry._

Nothing. And he was lonely as ever.

Jonathan was struck by the sudden and horrible realization that the need for contact he'd felt after the water torture hadn't faded. He hadn't felt it while the Bat was in the same room as him, but now that he was alone, the need was strong as ever. _Hell._ Maybe he could ignore it.

The minute he tried to made it clear that he could not ignore it.

_Christ. _If this wasn't definite proof that his life was one big, cosmic joke, he didn't know what was. Hating Scarecrow, hating the Batman, and most of all hating himself, he stood and went down the hall toward the kitchen, hating everything more and more with each step.


	15. Companionship

AN: Okay, so if you love _Buffy the Vampire Slayer _and/or hate _Twilight_, I demand that you go watch rebelliouspixels's "Buffy vs Edward (Twilight Remixed)" on Youtube. Funniest thing I've seen all week. In fact, watch it even if you've never seen either, it's still great.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bruce's life was starting to feel like some kind of demented children's book, the way the situation kept compounding. Something akin to "if you let a Joker into your cave, he'll want to bring his scarecrow friend. And if he brings his scarecrow friend, you'll have to keep them in separate cells. And if you keep them in separate cells, they'll start breaking out to visit each other. And if they start breaking out, you'll have to keep changing the security codes" and on and on and on, until they arrived at the present situation, which seemed to be "and if you let the scarecrow hold your hand, he'll get angry about it and give you the silent treatment when he figures out what's going on." Where that would lead, he had no idea and was in no hurry to find out.

At the moment, all he wanted to do was forget the fact that Jonathan Crane was in his house, that he as well as the Joker—whom there was still no sign of, despite Batman's efforts to track him down—knew Bruce's secret and he had yet to think of a way of silencing them that didn't involve breaking or at least bending his rule as far as it would go, and that even by his standards, he'd been away from Wayne Enterprises for too long. He didn't even want to think about all things to be done there that must have piled up in his absence, or what excuse he'd have to make. He'd have liked nothing more than to block it out, but that seemed to be beyond him at the moment, so he went with the next best thing, which was sinking into the nearest chair and enjoying a bagel.

Normally he at least tried for something with a greater nutritional value, but there were times when empty calories slathered in cream cheese were called for, and this was one of them.

He was three bites in when Jonathan appeared in the doorway, expression similar to that of a cat that'd just had a bucket of water dumped over its head. Very pointedly _not _looking at Bruce, he stalked over to the chair farthest from Bruce's and sat, staring at the table with utmost concentration.

Just when he thought this day couldn't get any stranger.

"Did you need something?"

Jonathan remained as silent as he'd been in the other room. It should have been a relief—their arguments were hardly something he enjoyed, and trying to reason with the man was like trying to persuade a boulder to move—but it wasn't. He had no idea if Jonathan really understood what was going on at the moment, or if that was wishful thinking on Bruce's part, and he was still broken from the exposure to water. He was more alert, yes, but that gave no definite sign of his mental state.

"Are you hungry?"

Jonathan stopped staring at the table long enough to raise his head and glare. All right, so he did understand what was going on, or at least that Bruce was speaking to him. Which didn't explain why he'd come into the kitchen, if he seemed opposed to eating and obviously wasn't in the mood to talk. Maybe it was just to be difficult. Difficult seemed to be Jonathan's favorite and standard behavior to begin with.

"You need to eat."

He glared for a moment longer and then looked away, as pointedly as he'd avoided meeting Bruce's eyes when he came in.

"I'm going to take that as an agreement."

Jonathan gave a loud and obvious sigh, but he didn't argue, and he ate what was put in front of him. He ate slowly, bit by miniscule bit, though whether that was to be argumentative or typical behavior for the man, Bruce wasn't sure. Jonathan had starved himself the previous February, and was thin enough to begin with, so eating like a bird was hardly far-fetched as a normal act for him. Beyond the starving thing, his eating habits hadn't been mentioned in his Arkham file, so Bruce had no idea if this was regular or not. The only thing he was sure of was that sitting here in silence with the minutes ticking by and Jonathan making every effort to avoid eye contact was beyond uncomfortable.

It didn't help matters when he left the kitchen and Jonathan followed him.

He realized he was being stalked about six feet down the hall and turned to find his captive five feet behind him. "What are you doing?"

It was amazing how well the man could say "What does it look it, you idiot?" without opening his mouth.

"If you want something, you need to tell me what it is."

Jonathan looked down at the carpet in defiance, crossing his arms.

"Look, I know you don't like this situation. Neither do I." _And I've only explained that a thousand times._ This was every bit as fruitless as trying to converse with the Joker. "But it does you no good to ignore me if you need something. You're only depriving yourself of whatever it is you're after."

He uncrossed his arms, with a slight glance to his left wrist, as if to check a watch that wasn't there.

"I can't help you unless I know what you want."

He looked back up, and the expression this time was clearly "Drop this conversation unless you're prepared to stand there all day." That, or Bruce was reading him wrong entirely, and just coming up with imagined responses to have some semblance of an answer. At this point, he couldn't tell.

"All right. I guess you can do without if you don't want to tell me." He turned to face forward again, kept walking. For a moment, there was only silence behind him, and then another set of footsteps. He turned back around, and Jonathan stopped moving.

_What?_ he asked, without saying anything.

Bruce sighed, and kept walking. Behind him, so did Jonathan.

Halfway down the hall, he stopped again. A glance behind showed that Jonathan had as well, still around five feet behind him and looking as aggravated about the situation as Bruce felt.

He tried it again a bit later on, and then on the stairs. Each time, Jonathan kept his distance, and he never looked happy, in spite of the fact that he had to know this was irritating to Bruce. If his intent in tagging along was to put Bruce ill-at-ease, then it was working and that was obvious. But he seemed to take no pleasure in that fact.

Either his discontent was an act, which Bruce doubted—Jonathan was good at concealing his emotions, but Bruce had learned from the last time he'd let his empathy for the man cloud his judgment and ended up getting bit on the face because of it—given that the man had far less control of himself as of late, silent treatment aside, or he didn't like following Bruce around like an imprinted chick.

He followed Bruce through the doorway to the master bedroom but stopped there, eyes rapt on Bruce until it became clear that his captor wasn't going anywhere. Then he focused on the carpet again, and sat. Bruce wasn't sure whether he'd intended to block the doorway with his body or if that had been an accident, but either way it was unnerving. Not that the entire thing wasn't unsettling already.

He tried focusing on one of several reports he'd been meaning to send in the previous week, only to find that impossible. As if life wasn't complicated enough, now he had scarecrow-stalking as the latest distraction. His eyes kept drifting back to the figure sitting on the floor. What did he _want_?

And then it all clicked into place, much as it had with the water that morning. _Loneliness._

And much as he had with the water that morning, he felt like a complete idiot for not having spotted it sooner. Though, to be fair, the idea that someone so misanthropic got lonely was an odd concept. Still, he was a human being underneath it all, and every human had some desire for companionship. And really, this hadn't come out of nowhere. Jonathan had asked when the Joker was returning the morning after the clown's escape, and talked of emptiness and abandonment more than once in his mad ramblings. Bruce had dismissed those statements as an effect of psychosis, much like his comments about glowing eyes and birds.

Apparently, he'd been very wrong in that assumption.

So Jonathan wasn't stalking him around Wayne Manor intending to annoy or unnerve. Just to fulfill his need to have someone nearby. Aside from Bruce's visits to bring food or pills or make sure he hadn't hurt himself, Jonathan had been alone, day in and day out. That had to be getting to him. No wonder he looked so unhappy about the situation; having to use a hated enemy to sate a need for interaction had to be degrading.

Bruce needed to find a way to get him back into Arkham, and soon, before it did permanent damage to the both of them, mentally or otherwise.

Understanding the motives behind the man's bizarre behavior didn't make it any less unnerving. But it did serve as an explanation, one that left Bruce able to take his eyes off the man and return to his current task, albeit discontentedly.

It was in this manner that the rest of the day passed.

It never stopped being uncomfortable, having Jonathan sit there so still and quietly that he might as well be another piece of furniture. But it became less strange as the day went on. Bruce supposed it was like sitting in a cold room; at first, the temperature was obvious. But the longer one spent in that environment, the more they adjusted and the less they noticed it, until the room didn't seem cold at all.

He never reached the point where he stopped noticing all together, but he was able to go on reading without looking up every five seconds. Bruce couldn't imagine that Jonathan was comfortable that way, sitting for hours on end without any way to pass the time, but each time he asked if the man needed anything, he was met with silence. Jonathan got up twice on his own, both times to go into the master bathroom, but the only other movements he made were to follow Bruce into the kitchen when he went to get lunch and dinner.

Around five that evening, Bruce remembered the issue of just what he was going to do with Jonathan when he went out and felt a flutter of apprehension. Throwing the man into his room and locking the door was all well and good in theory, but when Jonathan was so desperately clinging to Bruce to fill the void left by the Joker, things could turn out very badly in practice. If Jonathan couldn't stand to be in a room by himself, leaving the house entirely could make him panic, and maybe try to escape again, causing injuries in the process. And there was no way Alfred would let himself be shadowed.

He considered saying something, but decided against it. The last thing he needed to do was remind Jonathan—assuming that he hadn't remembered himself, which was as likely the Middle Eastern conflict resolving overnight—and give the man more time to plot something. So he stayed silent, through the reports and the meals and the news, and when the time came to suit up, he walked to the guest room first, stepped inside.

Jonathan followed, lingering in the doorway. The mix of disdain and fear in his eyes made it clear that he knew exactly what was about to happen. He took the pills and the glass of water that Bruce offered, and then brushed past his captor before he could be moved deeper into the room, and sat on the bed. He stared down at the bedspread as he'd done with the carpet and the table before that, shoulders just barely twitching.

Bruce closed and locked the door, listening for sounds from inside. There were none.

When he returned around two in the morning, he checked the guest room before the security cameras, in case something terrible had happened and a quick response was crucial. Jonathan was sleeping, and it seemed to Bruce that he'd arranged himself on the bed in a way that let him be as close to the door as possible, though it could just be a coincidence.

* * *

AN: The children's books Bruce is referring to are _If You Give a Mouse a Cookie _and _If You Give a Moose a Muffin_ and the like, in which one action escalates into many, many others. Giving a mouse a cookie, for example, makes it want a glass of milk and on and on.


	16. Distraction

AN: Massive apologies for the delays as of late. Thursday was my day off, but I ended up spending it comforting my cat after his vet visit, and then on Friday I worked late and my mom wanted to go to the movies. So yeah, sorry for the wait.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bruce Wayne had witnessed a number of horrifying things in his life. His parents' murder, of course, and the atrocious acts he'd seen during his seven years away from Gotham, both in and out of the League of Shadows. As Batman, he'd seen the agonies the city's criminals inflicted on both their enemies and their followers, and even themselves, and the atrocities people were willing to commit out of greed or anger or just for the fun of it never failed to make his blood run cold as it had under the fear toxin. Some of the things he'd seen while protecting Gotham had all but smothered the spark of hope that kept him going, the hope that the city could one day become the place his parents had fought for. All in all, Bruce had seen and experienced far worse things than waking up to find Jonathan Crane sitting beside him on the bed and leaning down to stare at him.

At that moment, however, it was all but impossible to remember the other experiences, and it took all the will power he had not to bolt up in shock and accidentally collide with Jonathan. Waking up with a supervillain hovering above him like an overgrown housecat tended to have that effect.

"Wh—what are you _doing_?" he managed, as soon as he regained enough oxygen to speak.

Jonathan gave him a contemptuous look and held out his hand.

It took Bruce longer than it should have to realize he was asking for the pills. He blamed the circumstances, which were less than conducive to rational thought. And he still wasn't speaking. Fantastic. If there was one thing Bruce was not looking forward to, it was playing charades with the man to figure out what he wanted at any given moment, for however long this lasted. Hopefully, he wasn't speaking out of spite, and not because he'd lost his voice from all the screaming.

"You know," Bruce said, sitting up, "I respected your desire to not have _your_ personal space invaded in your sleep."

Jonathan, with his hand still outstretched, gave a glare that would have been intimidating under normal circumstances. With the man silent, captive, and acting like a lost puppy more than anything else, it lost some effect.

"I'm getting them. Relax."

Much to his displeasure, Jonathan followed him across the room as he did, at the same distance as the day prior. So not only was he still electively mute, he was still desperate for companionship. Joy. Bruce needed to find him a distraction before they both lost their minds.

He gave Jonathan the pills, and stepped into the bathroom. "I'm taking a shower. And I'd prefer to have you not standing in front of the door when I get out."

The man gave no indication as to whether or not he had heard.

* * *

Stupid fucking Batman.

It occurred to Jonathan that, much as when he'd been living with the Joker, the use of obscenities in his speech had picked up far more than when he lived alone. At least with the Joker, there had been physical pleasures to detract from the intellectual and often emotional hell he found himself in, pleasures that he wasn't going to dwell on because he was above that and besides, Scarecrow hated to think back on it. Here, it was all hell, all the time.

He tried calming himself by focusing on all of the wonderfully blood-chilling, horribly painful things he was going to do to the Bat once he escaped. It didn't take. Scarecrow was the one who thought up all the best tortures, and Scarecrow was still off doing whatever it was he did behind the wall between them. Jonathan had never really varied his methods, going with the tried and true method of poison, observe, repeat.

As if he wanted to be here. How dare the Batman act as if he was the one being put upon? He wasn't the prisoner, tagged like a dog and forced to stay in the miserable—if luxurious—prison. He wasn't the one who'd lost his closest friend. The fact that Batman didn't know about that didn't matter. Jonathan viewed suffering of this magnitude as more of an act of nature than an emotion, and following that logic, everyone around him out to be affected. That the Bat seemed more irritated than anything else was beyond infuriating.

_He is dead. He's…so dead that I…that he'll…_

It occurred to Jonathan that he never really got to the end of those threats, under ordinary circumstances. Scarecrow would always either finish it with something gory and beautiful, or interrupt to tell him that he was being an idiot and he needed to control himself before he got the both of them killed. Now even his thoughts were deteriorating.

Ordinarily, he hated codependence. It was weak, and a way to hide from real problems, and it seemed the dependent member always chose the worst possible person to cling to, as Harley had with the Joker. That was another thing that made the situation so hellish; the fact that he was reduced to such a pathetic person. He wasn't—and never would—depend on the Batman for an emotional connection, but the need to have another person's presence was overwhelming, much to his disgust.

But Scarecrow was different. Because Scarecrow _was _Jonathan, every bit as much as he was a separate being. They were joined but apart at the same time, like the Holy Trinity his great-grandmother had ranted about with almost every breath. One body with two people. That was why it hurt so much to be apart; it was as if a part of his soul had been severed.

And then the Batman had the nerve to behave as though this was worse on him. As if he woke up every morning with an instant of hope that his closest companion had returned only to find himself still deserted, like an everlasting nightmare where he woke over and over only to find that he was still trapped. That son of a bitch. As soon as Jonathan figured out how to cut the tracking device off, he was going to come back with all the fear toxin he could carry and laugh as the Batman screamed himself into cardiac arrest, and—

It occurred to him, quite suddenly, that maybe he didn't need to escape at all. Or that he could gain freedom without another breakout attempt, anyway. Bruce Wayne had a social life, as he'd learned all too well thanks to the television in Arkham. The man was the prince of Gotham City. He had to have at least one phone, if not several. The Batman might have tapped the phones, but a call to 911 could not be ignored. Even if he was locked up immediately after calling, if he was in the manor he could break a window and scream with all he had. If he was locked up in the cave again, or a room without windows, at least he would have tried.

He looked around the master bedroom and realized, as suddenly as he'd gotten the idea, that there was no phone. At least, not that he could see.

_What sort of socialite doesn't have a phone in the bedroom?_

Not that it mattered. There had to be a phone somewhere, at least one. Cell phones or not, someone as paranoid as the Batman would have a back up method of communication in case something when wrong. All he had to do was find one.

However, at the moment his stomach twisted at the thought of leaving the room while the Batman remained, so he resolved to find it later.

* * *

Honey-almond body scrub really ought to be one of those things soothing enough to make him forget all the problems of the world, at least for the length of time he took in the shower. Usually, it was. Sometime during his first year as Batman, he'd taught himself to bury what he'd experienced when he got home, which was usually about the time he got in the shower. Not the crimes themselves—some part of his mind was always working to solve them—but the emotions that came with them. He'd heard that police officers did the same thing. If people in this line of work couldn't bury all the frustration and rage and regret, it would eat them alive.

Usually, he was good at burying it.

Today, on the other hand, he wasn't feeling any of those emotions so much as apprehension. Today, he was going back to Wayne Enterprises and he had no idea how his suddenly needy captive was going to handle that. Whether it was with panic attacks or by following Alfred—which he knew Alfred wasn't going to allow—Bruce couldn't see things going well.

It struck him that he was thinking of Jonathan Crane almost like a house pet, and that that didn't bode well at all.

Jonathan was not standing in front of the door when he opened it. He was instead sitting in front of it, a small but important distinction, and one that nearly got him trampled.

"I'm not going to be here today."

Jonathan had yet to stand or raise his head, so his expression was hidden, but Bruce thought he saw a slight tension in the man's posture.

Bruce disappeared into the closet to get dressed. To his relief, Jonathan was not in front of the door to that when he came back out, but rather still in his position on the opposite side of the room. He only stood when Bruce left the room, trailing after him in a now familiar but still unsettling pattern.

As he had yesterday, he ate what was put in front of him. And also as yesterday, he did it slowly enough that he might as well have not been eating at all. Bruce reflected as he so often had that he had no business caring for a mental patient, and he needed to figure out what would keep Jonathan silent about things and get him back to Arkham, fast. If only life hadn't piled up during this madness, so that he could go on neglecting the world outside and focus solely on this. Jonathan wasn't powerful, at least not physically, but he had an ace up his sleeve and he was nothing if not an opportunist. If Bruce gave him the slightest opening, he would exploit it for all it was worth, and then some.

At any rate, figuring out how to keep him from telling or blackmailing Bruce with what he knew was his most important concern, but not the most pressing. The one at hand now was figuring out how to prevent an episode to rival the one in the bathroom from yesterday when Bruce left. He thought of locking Jonathan back into the guest room, GPS or not, but given the man's mental state, he doubted confinement was the best idea.

Besides, Gotham's villains were talented at break-outs, with or without lock-picking supplies.

He could always sit his captive down in front of one of the televisions in the hopes that it would distract him or at least bore him to sleep, but there was no chance of that working or doing anything aside from pissing Jonathan off. He wasn't twelve, after all, despite his behaviors to the contrary. Besides, daytime television was hardly an engaging distraction, and he doubted that his _Bond_ DVDs would be either. Not to such an intellectual.

And then the one thing that might actually work struck him.

He stood, and left the kitchen. He didn't have to ask or order Jonathan to follow him, or even look back to know that he was.

* * *

It occurred to Crane by the time they'd gone up the second flight of stairs that he'd never been in this part of the manor before. The Joker's midnight kitchen raid, as well as his own walks through the mansion, had never taken him to any of the manor's four towers, one of which he was in now, and he had no idea where he was being led. He'd never thought to look, and it wasn't as if Wayne Manor had ever been covered on one of those lifestyles of famous people shows, for reasons that, after learning his secret, became obvious.

Apprehension at just where they were headed blossomed in his stomach, mixing with the adrenaline already kicking around from the thought of spending the day alone—which brought about even greater self-disgust than before, more than he'd thought was possible—creating a twisting feeling that made the possibility of retching again much too likely.

He slowed a bit, making note of their route in case he had to run for a hiding place, and letting the distance between them grow from five feet to six or seven.

The Batman noticed, of course, because nothing in his life could ever go easily. It was like an unwritten law. He slowed as well, giving Crane no choice but to resume the previous distance or stop moving altogether, and he wasn't about to admit his fear, even if it got him killed. So against his better judgment, he continued walking, until the Batman stopped in front of a pair of large and ominous doors.

Crane reflected that Batman's vow against killing said nothing against severely maiming, and that the man was well off the deep end anyway, and what little sanity he had left could have snapped sometime in the night. He had no idea what waited on the other side of those doors and wondered if this wouldn't be a good time to start running.

* * *

"Don't be scared."

Jonathan shot him a look that suggested he wanted to tear out Bruce's vocal cords and stomp on them. Of course the self-proclaimed Master of Fear would never admit to his dread, even if it was as obvious as a black bra under a white shirt.

Not that there was any point in arguing about it. Especially when Jonathan wasn't talking. It would only lead to Bruce inventing responses for the man in his head, and if there was one thing crazier than having a one-sided argument, it was treating a dangerous madman as if he was an imaginary friend who couldn't speak for himself.

So he only shrugged, opened the doors, and stepped inside. He walked to the light switch as Jonathan took a small step toward the doorway. He waited, as if expecting some horrible consequence that didn't come, and then took another step, and another.

Not wanting to startle him during the process, Bruce waited until he was in the doorway to flip on the lights and illuminate Wayne Manor's library.

* * *

AN: Yes, I got that idea from _Beauty and the Beast. _I'm kind of a Disney fanatic, although I love the original, darker fairy tales every bit as much.

Narcissists don't view their emotions as their own, apparently. They think feelings are more like acts of God, and therefore, you should be upset if they are, and if you're not they will make you unhappy just because.

I'm convinced that Bruce Wayne would be a fan of James Bond. Plus, watch that scene in TDK when he dismantles the shotgun and tell me Bale wouldn't make a fantastic 007 himself. I dare you.

I have no idea what type of soap or body wash Bruce Wayne uses, but honey-almond is the kind used by Patrick Bateman, another Christian Bale character in _American Psycho_ (along with like a thousand other things; the man's got more skin care products than a Bath and Body Works). As they're both all about keeping up appearances, I figured they might have similar products. Though I can't see Bruce using an herb-mint facial mask.

I don't if we ever saw the library in Nolan's films, or where it was if we did. If I've moved it somewhere it wasn't, well, the manor burned down. Let's just say that they moved it when it rebuilt.


	17. Small Comforts

AN: Again with the delays. I spent the majority of yesterday in a car, driving up to Bloomington and back. Sorry about that.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan remained in the doorway, blinking. Whether that was caused by the sudden light or the sight of the library itself, Bruce wasn't sure. But the way Jonathan's mouth had fallen ever so slightly open led him to assume that it was the latter.

He ought to have realized long ago that books would work for placation in this circumstance. The events of last February had put Batman in Jonathan's apartment, after all, and the amount of books the man had, considering that about ninety percent of the money he'd had as a doctor went straight into toxin, should have been more than a bit of a tip off. True, Bruce had been more concerned with getting out of there without anyone being shot, stabbed, or burned alive, but still. For all his skill in observing details and ordinary detective work, nine times out of ten it fell flat when it came to villains in the manor. It was too intimate a situation for his usual detached understanding to do much good, Bruce supposed.

"You can go inside, you know," he said softly.

If Jonathan heard him, there was no indication of it. But for once it seemed as if the silence wasn't out of hatred so much as shock. Considering Arkham's ramshackle and less than spectacular novel collection, this had to be the largest amount of books he'd been around in a long time, unless he'd been breaking into libraries unbeknownst to Batman. Logic would dictate that as a bad way to spend time on the run, but logic and villainy weren't the closest of friends, and Bruce had often happened upon Pamela Isley admiring gardens or Edward Nigma playing chess and the like.

Bruce stepped to the side of Jonathan and back into the hallway, ever so slightly nudging the man into the room. Jonathan complied without resistance, for once, still too overcome to get angry. It was almost unnerving, how well this had worked.

"You can find your way to the kitchen from here, can't you?"

Jonathan nodded in manner that managed, somehow, to be nothing like the other nods he'd given in the past day or so. His expression _was _unnerving, but not in the manner typical of Batman's foes. He didn't look at all dangerous or mad at the moment, just happy.

Well, of course he could be happy. He was human as anyone else, even if he had parted ways with sanity long, long ago. And it wasn't as if Bruce had never seen a criminal express happiness before—manic glee seemed to be the only thing the Joker was capable of feeling, and even that could be an act—but it had always been a different kind of contentment than the one currently before him. When Batman was privy to a nemesis's exhilaration, it was happiness caused by harm or theft or destruction. Often, some combination of the three. Those were the sort of expressions he'd seen from Jonathan Crane before; amusement at the effects of his toxin, or sarcastic smiles that didn't reach his eyes.

This expression was different. Normal, even. Just someone expressing pleasure at being around something they truly loved, and something innocent to boot. He had never looked as innocuous as he did in this moment, not even when he'd been cowering under the sink in his apartment, and that made it all the more incongruous.

He brushed the unease aside, reminding himself that he had places to be and excuses to make. "Don't forget to eat." The last thing he needed was a starved supervillain. The man was enough of a twig to begin with, and would have been completely harmless if he wasn't mad, cunning, and sadistic. But of course what he lacked in strength he made up with in brilliance and determination. Because otherwise, Bruce's job would be that much easier.

Jonathan, who had remembered how to walk by now and was gravitating to the nearest bookshelf, moving with the combined caution and curiosity of a cat in a new house, didn't respond.

Holding in a sigh and several hundred misgivings about leaving his captive alone and unsupervised once again, Bruce closed the doors and started down the hall, trying to keep this mess out of his mind.

* * *

It wasn't until the door closed that Jonathan realized the Batman had left.

In that brief and glorious few minutes after the Bat had turned the lights on, he'd managed to forget the miseries of his present situation. His captivity, the anklet tightly strapped to him and monitoring his every move, the Batman's presence. Even Scarecrow's absence had, for that short and beautiful period, disappeared from his mind.

Books were the one refugee he'd had in his childhood, growing up without friends, caring family, pets, or television. It was almost surprising that he'd turned to books, given that the first he'd been introduced to—and the only one he'd been allowed to read in the manor, despite its own library—was the Bible, a book that he'd despised from the moment he was old enough to realize that while his great-grandmother's fanaticism wasn't the only reason for the way he'd been treated, it was a large part and he wanted nothing to do with it.

He couldn't remember having any love of books until kindergarten, when his teacher had complimented him on his ability to read—he couldn't recall if he'd taught himself, or if his great-grandmother had, and he couldn't imagine why she would, except to let him read about the fires of hell on his own instead of wasting her time to tell him so. It was the first time he ever recalled being praised by anyone, for anything. It was also the first thing that had set him apart from his peers and made him a target. Which still wasn't enough to kill his love for the one thing able to distract him from all life's little torments.

It was the first and greatest of his coping mechanisms, with the other major ones being horseback riding and experimenting with toxins. And it had made life bearable until the Batman had to go ruining things by closing the door.

The loneliness was back. Because apparently, he just couldn't have a happy moment in his life without the cosmos ripping it out and stomping it to bits. It was bad enough to be a prisoner and abandoned. To have the urge to go tearing down the hall after the Batman and stalk him until fatigue stopped him moved things up another hundred levels in misery.

To top it off, there was anger on top of the torment. No matter how pleasurable being in the middle of a giant library was, it was another placation. Not one as insulting as the bear, but the thought behind it was the same. It was like distracting a child unhappy at being left with a babysitter by opening up the toy box. It didn't matter what the intent behind it was, whether to make life easier for the Bat or to be truly comforting. It was still disrespectful to him, implying that he needed a security blanket.

And he did, but if the Batman had any decency as a human being, he would have ignored that fact.

Now there was confusion, on top of everything else. He was standing perfectly still, halfway between the doors and the shelves, but his thoughts were as much of a whirlwind as they'd been since he first realized his other half had gone.

Intent. What _was _the Batman's intent in all this? He didn't want his secret exposed, obviously, but just because he wanted to _keep_ his prisoner, that didn't mean Jonathan had to be kept comfortably. He could almost understand why the Bat hadn't done any of the things he'd threatened the night he'd lost his temper, as they'd twist his ethics, effective though they'd be. That still didn't explain why he wasn't kept locked up. Putting someone in a cell couldn't be inhumane by the Batman's standards, or he'd never bring criminals to the police. And while the GPS made letting Jonathan wander considerably safer, it wasn't foolproof.

Much as Jonathan hated to admit it, the Batman was smart enough to know that.

_I'm trying to be nice._

The Bat's words came unbidden to his mind. He shook his head as if to clear it. He'd been hearing that sort of nonsense from his psychiatrists for forever and a day now, and he wasn't about to believe it now, even if it turned out this place had a first edition copy of _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow _or something else equally fantastic.

Though the man _had _had the insight to realize that bringing him here would make the situation somewhat less atrocious—

No. He'd been to Jonathan's apartment, and picked up on the number of novels and psychiatric texts there. That was it. If the Batman was able to manipulate the public so well into believe that he was an empty-headed socialite, there was no reason he wouldn't try manipulating Jonathan. It was just a ploy, and the only thing that made it seem remotely convincing was the fact that Scarecrow was missing and Batman had stopped the Joker's attempts to murder Jonathan the previous February. That was it.

_I'm trying to help you._

All right, so maybe he _thought _he was being nice. But in the same way that his great-grandmother had thought the things she did were the will of the Lord. Just because someone believed something, and outward appearances indicated that belief was true, it didn't give the idea veracity. The fact remained that underneath the façade, the Batman was only a spoiled child getting his thrills under the guise of helping people, and treating Jonathan humanely wasn't a noble action. Just one he engaged in to make himself feel better.

Jonathan wasn't about to be swayed by it. He'd let himself be tricked into believing the Joker cared, and very nearly paid for it with his life on multiple occasions. If the man who'd driven him mad to begin with thought that he could do the same, he was sadly mistak—oh, this place had a copy of _The Man Who Laughs. _That abated his anger considerably.

* * *

Thank God for the Russian ballet.

Bruce had dropped the guise of illness as an excuse for his absences long ago, as anyone who got sick that often and still went out partying until the break of dawn would be dead by now. Traveling somewhere on a whim was a common excuse, but as he'd gone out at night earlier in the week to keep the gossip columnists from getting suspicious, that one wouldn't work either.

Thus leading to another common excuse; women. Many of Bruce's ex-girlfriends—if the two or three dates he went on with them could really be considered a relationship—resented him afterward for not carrying things on, and many others simply moved on to other members of the Gotham elite. Since the other members of the Gotham elite weren't Batman and actually had time for relationships, the girls tended to get serious with them, and as such would negate any attempt of Bruce's to ask them to cover for him.

Natascha, on the other hand, had remained on friendly terms with Bruce, was currently single, and performing in a city within reasonable enough distance for him to claim that he'd been spending time with her. Out of respect for her and gratitude for her agreement to cover for him, his excuse had been catching up with an old friend as opposed to rekindling an old flame.

That, at least, had satisfied suspicions and disgusted the many employees of Wayne Enterprises who viewed him as a disgrace to the company. It didn't do a thing to lighten the load that had built up while he was gone, or changed the fact that Lucius had to pretend to be irritated with him to keep up appearances. But the day had passed, albeit slowly.

He arrived back home around six that evening, half-expecting to find the manor in ruins. Logically, he knew that if something had gone wrong, his phone would have gone off, or Alfred would have contacted him, but the super criminals of Gotham tended to defy logic brazenly and often.

The mansion, however, was in one piece, and opening the door to the library revealed that Jonathan was almost exactly where he'd left him, but sitting now and surrounded by books stacked nearly as high as his seated form. Bruce almost pointed out that there were chairs in the room, but given how deeply Jonathan seemed to be absorbed in what he was reading, he'd doubted the suggestion would be heard.

"You have Lacan."

Bruce started. Jonathan had given no indication that he was aware of his captor's presence until the words were leaving him mouth. "What?"

"Lacan. The psychoanalyst." His hands tightened a bit on the cover of the book he was reading.

"Oh." Bruce had no idea whom he was talking about, but then, he hadn't read the majority of the books in the library, especially not his father's medical texts. His parents had insured the books they collected, as many of them were rare, and after the mansion burned down, Bruce had simply recreated the library's contents using the insurance lists.

"It's in the original French," Jonathan said, in a hushed tone of reverence usually reserved for churches.

"Have you eaten today?"

Jonathan did look up at that one, his expression blank before shifting into irritation, as if he'd just now remembered that he was angry at Bruce.

"I'll take that as a no. Come on."

He looked at his surroundings with a slight twitch.

"You can come back. But you need to eat."

"Stop doing that."

"Doing what?"

Jonathan didn't answer, only closed the book and put it down as gently as one might lay down an infant. He stood and followed Bruce, dragging behind at first. The instant they were out of sight of the library, however, he trailed the man as closely as a he had yesterday.

* * *

AN: I'm inventing Jonathan backstory again, at least as far as I know.

There's a writer by the name of John Cheever who's also a diagnosed narcissist, and in his autobiography he mentions an incident in which the affairs he had were made public. After the truth came out, his wife and children told him that they'd known all along and still loved him, and rather than being relieved or ashamed of his actions, he was furious with them for seeing through his façade. Because if they'd really cared, they would only have seen what he wanted them to see. Narcissists don't like attempts to comfort them about their insecurities or bad decisions, it seems.

_The Man Who Laughs_ is a novel by Victor Hugo, whom I thought Jonathan might be a fan of as his works are very dark and depressing. This particular novel also has the bonus of a character named Gwynplaine, who has his mouth cut into a smile and was the inspiration for the original design of the comic Joker. You can see his amazing smile at the top of this page: tvtropes. org/ pmwiki/ pmwiki. Php / Main/ SlasherSmile. Look familiar?

Lacan is a French psychoanalyst who was every bit as influential to psychoanalysis as Freud. The reason Freud is well-known and Lacan is not is because Lacan's writings are almost impossible to understand.


	18. Observations

AN: So I've finally got the fabric to start on my Harley Quinn Halloween costume—I say finally as if All Hallows' Eve is days away because I'm a neurotic—and I'm really happy with all the fabric I was able to find. My only issues are the fear that I'm gain/lose weight by October, and that my jumpsuit pattern has the zipper in the front as opposed to the back. Which will make it easier to put on, and it'll be hidden by the collar, but I'm an accuracy freak, and I can't help but think that if Harley had her zipper in the front, it would likely get pulled down by mistake during fights. I don't know where I get these ideas.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

It occurred to Jonathan on the stairs back down to the main part of the mansion that he'd forgotten about breaking out.

In his defense, the Batman's library was extensive, and after reading Arkham's extremely inadequate collection—even more so when his high standards had eliminated half of it—he'd been more than a little desperate for intellectual stimulation. Especially when the only other person here who could hold an intelligent, painless conversation with him was currently on the other side of the impenetrable barrier in his mind. All in all, being a little sidetracked by the library was to be expected.

However, there was a difference between a little sidetracked, and forgetting about escaping entirely, and that difference was the size of a small elephant.

And now he was back on speaking terms with the Batman, somehow. He wasn't sure how that had happened. True, finding Lacan anywhere outside of a university or a psychoanalyst's office was an event worth taking pause at, but that was no reason to reopen communications with the man who was just as responsible as the Joker for this mess. He hadn't made Jonathan give up the pills, but he'd driven him crazy in the first place, and if he hadn't been institutionalized, Jonathan would never have met the Joker and none of this would have happened. So the Batman was guilty as well.

The Bat seemed to have realized that too, thick as his head was, and was apparently working through his guilt by asking Jonathan if he needed anything or if he was all right every few seconds. That was another reason to return to the silent treatment; he refused to abate the man's shame in the slightest if it was avoidable, need for intellectual stimulation aside.

"Is there anything in particular that you want?"

"Besides your death?" _Damn it._ Not talking. He'd resolved not to do it less than five seconds ago, what was wrong with him? True, it had been an insult, but it was still acknowledging the Batman's presence and making his job that much easier. As if things weren't bad enough, his vocal cord were betraying him. He couldn't be _that _lonely.

Something that was far too close to a smirk for Jonathan's comfort crossed the Batman's face. "I was thinking more along the lines of food."

_I am not speaking to him. I am not speaking to him. I'm not—_"And just what, exactly, are you grinning about?" _Hell._ Apparently, he was that lonely. Or that in need of a conversation partner who would actually respond.

"Honestly? What you just said. The threats tend to lose effect when they're the only things that you say." He didn't need to add "especially since you can't do a thing to me" for it to be perfectly understood. Jonathan had never had much in the way of brute force, and the Bat was too intelligent to let himself be drawn into the mind games. Damn him and his stupid playboy smile. Jonathan wanted nothing more than to bash every one of the man's perfectly straight and whitened teeth in.

He was able to keep himself from responding this time, though only just. There was silence, which could only have lasted for a minute or so but seemed to stretch into eternity, and then the Batman had the decency to turn around and keep on walking. Jonathan trailed as far behind as he could stand to be, discreetly searching the walls and open rooms they passed for a phone.

He didn't find any. Considering that this part of the manor looked unoccupied, and that he couldn't see every bit of the rooms, that wasn't so surprising, but still. Wasn't that what rich people did; bought loads of ridiculously expensive versions of common items, just to show off before they let them collect dust?

"Need something?"

The Batman was inhuman. It was the only explanation, given that Jonathan had barely been turning his head as he glanced. He had no soul. Jonathan had always suspected it. "I believe you've asked me that a thousand times now. And I've either said no or failed to answer every time. Are you incapable of learning from experience?"

"Maybe I'm hoping you'll come around."

"Not happening."

The Batman only shrugged. Jonathan felt himself twitch in annoyance. As if it wasn't enough of an insult for the Bat to act as if his prisoner was the irrational one, now he had the gall to brush Jonathan's comments aside. As if he didn't matter. If he was going to be held here against his will, he ought to be acknowledged.

However, Jonathan was too angry at the moment to come up with anything to say that wasn't some variant of "get angry" or "notice me," and he'd rather bite straight through his tongue than admit such a weakness. How he remained silent until they got into the kitchen, he wasn't quite sure, just as he wasn't quite sure what made him break the silence. There was just something about the sight of the Batman looking through his refrigerator like a normal person that broke the dam. "Isn't this sort of thing what your hired help is for?"

"Around the time I turned sixteen," the Bat said, without looking up, "Alfred told me that if I could be trusted to drive, I could be trusted to get my own meals. He cooks. He doesn't serve unless he's eating at the same time. Or there's a party or something."

_Christ. _If there was one thing that he didn't need, it was Bat-anecdotes. Why couldn't he have the Joker's gift of enraging the Batman into silence? Oh, right, because he wasn't suicidal. Still. Death couldn't be much worse than this, even if the pain leading up to it was.

He was opening his mouth to say something insulting when the phone caught his eye. The kitchen had one. Well, of course it did. Weren't kitchens and bathrooms the parts of the house with the highest chance of accidents? He wasn't for sure on that, but it didn't matter now. Salvation was finally within reach. All he had to do was come here in the night, when the Batman had gone, or the next morning, to keep from arousing the butler's suspicion, if he could wait that long. And that would be it. Freedom. It would have been anticlimactic, if he wasn't so overjoyed at the prospect. After all the struggle, something as simple as the Bat being too stupid to remember the phones.

They said not to question miracles. Scientifically-minded as Jonathan was, he'd always considered that nonsense, and the mantra of people who didn't want to have their extraordinary happenings proven to be mundane. This miracle, on the other hand, he was perfectly fine with quietly accepting.

"It doesn't work."

He jerked at the unexpected words, turning to face the Batman. "What?"

"The phone. That you were looking at." He gestured with the hand not holding a plate. "I had the line disconnected. We're only using the cell phones now."

In the space where his soul might be if he believed in such things, Jonathan felt something snap. Maybe the Bat was bluffing. He had to be bluffing. Jonathan couldn't lose his last hope like that. He crossed the room, oblivious to what the Batman's reaction was or even the man's presence, and picked it up. No dial tone, only dead silence.

He wasn't sure how long he stood there before there was a hand taking the phone from his and replacing it on the base, then leading him to the table. "I'm sorry."

"Stop mocking me."

"I'm not. I know you hate being here."

Well, if he had that insight, he ought to realize that talking was another thing Jonathan hated, particularly with his nemesis on the other end of the conversation. "So let me leave."

There was no answer, of course. He hadn't been expecting one. There was another awkward period of quiet in which Jonathan sat cursing the phone companies, Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the damn thing and giving him false hope, himself for not coming up with it sooner, before the line was disconnected, and most of all, the Batman.

Damn him. Why did he have to be relatively intelligent? Wasn't it enough that he could beat people senseless without breaking a sweat, or induce fear through his appearance alone? What Jonathan wouldn't give to have come from a city like Metropolis, where he'd only need intelligence and a meteor rock to protect him from that city's resident vigilante. Or Coast City, where'd he only need to wear yellow, or in Los Angeles, where he'd only need…whatever it was that doctor had used against Captain Hammer. Some sort of ray. But no. Batman had to have both the strength of an ox and brains in his head, much as Jonathan hated to admit the latter. It was entirely unfair.

"You should really eat more."

If Jonathan was being generous about things, the statement might have struck him as genuine concern, or something said to lighten the mood. The mood he was actually in was very far from generosity. "Considering that I had to re-learn how to eat last winter, you're lucky I'm getting this much." The urge to starve himself into a coma returned. It must be better than this.

"Did your hand ever fully heal?"

He put his hand under the table at once. "Of course not. The nail went through a nerve. It's never going to fully heal."

"Sorry."

Jonathan refused to raise his head. He could tell from the tone of voice that the Batman had that piteous look yet again, and he didn't think he could stand to see it. Not now. If he didn't hate the man so greatly, he'd be worried about starting to believe it. That was how lonely things were getting.

_Scarecrow?_

Nothing, of course. He felt tears sting his eyes that he refused to let out, much as he needed it. The profound wrongness of the situation had moved from affecting only his cognition to his emotions as well. The only person who'd unconditionally cared for him had deserted him for, admittedly, a good reason, but now his absence could be justified by nothing but spite.

And meanwhile, the person he hated more than anyone was doing a disturbingly good act of pretending that he cared. Not that it made him at all helpful—the psychiatrists at Arkham had been the same way, and they were as useful as a match in a rainstorm—but it was still disconcerting. He didn't like seeing the Batman act this way, much as he didn't like being in this house.

He'd always known, even before he knew the face behind the mask, that the Batman was just a man. But he was more than that; a terrifying figure that would always haunt Jonathan's nightmares, a monster that had taken everything from him without looking back. That was the Batman he thought of when he closed his eyes.

So being around an unmasked Batman who felt the need to act like an overly concerned parent put him on uneven ground to say the least. It was dangerous to see the Bat this way, on his home field where he didn't have to be a monster. Because monsters couldn't care. But people could.

And the last thing Jonathan needed was to let himself believe that the Batman cared. He'd made that the mistake with the Joker, and he never wanted to make it again.

* * *

AN: The bit about yellow refers to the Green Lantern. Yes, it's actually one of his weakness. There's a rather hilarious Batman comic moment in which Robin and Batman paint all of Wayne Manor yellow, excluding everything inside it, their costumes, and themselves, and invite the Green Lantern over for lemonade. He's not amused, to say the least.

Captain Hammer is a character from _Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, _a forty-five minute musical made by the creator of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ during the writer's strike last year. It tells the story of an aspiring villain, Dr. Horrible, attempted to become a member of the Evil League of Evil while also trying to win the girl of his dreams. You can watch the entire thing on Hulu, but if you don't have the time (or if you have dial-up), I feel that this song is a perfect introduction to Captain Hammer and the others: www. youtube. com/ watch?v= NN3eBvZvUXk

And here's a useless fact that has nothing to do with anything but that I'm still going to mention in honor of _Public Enemies _coming out today: my great-grandparents were Indiana farmers and once sold eggs to a man whom they later came to believe was John Dillinger, based on his locations nearby at the time and his appearance and such. No idea if it was him or not, but still a story I like to tell.


	19. Assumptions

AN: Happy Fourth of July, everyone! For whatever reason, my town did the fireworks on the third, so here I am, writing.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bruce had gone through a number of awkward moments in his life—as a rule, living as a playboy who acted as if women were as disposable as Kleenex tended to lead to such situations—but aside from being kissed by the Joker, he'd have to say that sitting at the kitchen table, trying to hold a conversation with the Scarecrow took the cake.

Why he was trying, he still wasn't sure. True, there was the off chance that his persistence would bring Jonathan around, some day, but time and time again, his efforts had demonstrated that he'd be better off giving up. Just because something worked eventually, that didn't make it a good idea. You could unlock a door by repeatedly punching it until you broke through, but there were better and far less painful ways to achieve the same effect.

Unfortunately, he couldn't think of any other ways to try getting through to the man. And he had the nagging feeling that, miserable as it was, he had to find some way to connect, or risk things going the same way they had with the Joker. While Jonathan was less of a threat to the city, he was the greater threat to Bruce. Unlike the Clown Prince of Crime, he'd have no reservations about exposing Batman's identity, or at least blackmailing him in exchange for hiding it.

And on top of all that, Bruce hadn't forgotten his captive's biting comments from when the Joker was dissociated, when Jonathan had implied that the villains of the city mattered less to Batman than the innocents. Writing off the obvious suffering would be proving just that, and Bruce couldn't do it. The Joker had been right, in a way, about the importance of Batman as a symbol of justice. He couldn't let himself neglect anyone, regardless of his feelings toward them, or he'd be no better than the people he fought. Just another masked man terrorizing the city for his own ends.

He'd struggled to keep himself in check for far too long to allow that now.

"How did the Joker leave?"

The question broke almost ten minutes of silence between them, and Bruce had been lost enough in his own thoughts that he started at it, slightly. "You don't remember?"

"If I did, I wouldn't have asked, would I?"

All right, so he'd walked into that one. Still, while Jonathan hadn't been present at the Joker's escape, he had witnessed the news broadcast in which the Joker had shown off his casts. Considering Jonathan's reticence in communication, Bruce had no idea how much of that he recalled. "He jumped off a balcony. And broke both legs in the process."

A look of subdued irritation crossed Jonathan's face, as if he'd been hoping to use the same method until he heard what it entailed. The look was gone in an instant, however, replaced by one of amusement and something like satisfaction. "He broke his legs and you still couldn't catch him?"

"He caught me off guard."

"Obviously." Something that was very nearly a smirk crossed Jonathan's face.

Bruce considered protesting, explaining that the man had acted suicidal in order to lower Bruce's guard when he did consent to stepping away from the edge. He didn't. It wouldn't accomplish anything beyond more annoyance on his end of things. "Do you miss him?"

The effect of the question was staggering: the blood drained from Jonathan's face in seconds and he bolted upright, looking Bruce in the eye for the first time since entering the room. "_What_?"

Why was he so talented at terrorizing people when his intent was anything but? It was one thing to make someone cry in the Batsuit; even when you were being rescued, the Batman was scary. But to bring on panic attacks when he was trying to be comforting was something else entirely. "The Joker," he said, softly, trying not to do any more damage. "Do you miss him?"

For a moment Jonathan only stared. Then some of his color came back and he shook his head, looking more bewildered that shocked. "No."

Obviously he did, though why he was stunned that other people realized it, Bruce had no idea. Perhaps it was a narcissism thing. Or he honestly thought Bruce was that clueless. The latter didn't make much sense, considering how many times Batman had outwitted him, but super criminals and logic didn't often go hand in hand, or even on the same side of the street.

On the other hand, maybe he just resented the fact that he clearly harbored feelings for the Joker, even after the man had beaten him within an inch of his life without so much of an apology. That, Bruce could understand, if only somewhat. He'd been a willing victim of Ra's Al Ghul's manipulations, and knowing the twisted motives lurking inside his mentor didn't make the respect and caring he'd had for the man fade. Not entirely.

He doubted that Jonathan would appreciate the understanding, though. He'd take it as an insult, somehow.

"What was your excuse?"

This time, it was Bruce's turn to be thrown off guard. "What?"

"Today. When you went back. And you'd been gone." His voice had picked up speed, and there was a slight stammer to the words. Bruce guessed that he was just talking to change the subject, without putting much thought into what he said before he said it. "What was your excuse?"

"Catching up with an old friend." Given the circus his life had become as of late, having a civil conversation shouldn't have been so bizarre. It was.

"And if the press asks her?"

Probably, Jonathan was hoping for his captor to be caught in any possible contradiction, and have himself be discovered as a result. Bruce, however, found it more interesting—and a bit depressing—that the man's mind heard "friend" in conjunction with Bruce Wayne and immediately jumped to a woman. It was a sign that his playboy act was working, yes, but it also showed that he'd cemented the view of himself as a chauvinistic pig even in the minds of people who knew his relationships were façades. He doubted his parents would have approved. "She'll cover for me."

Jonathan's expression was now a mix of disappointment and disgust. Bruce considered explaining that he didn't pay women off to lie on his behalf, but decided against it. He was unlikely to change any preconceived notions in the first place, and he still wasn't sure exactly what the relationship between himself and Natascha was. Certainly, he wasn't paying her for discretion. But he had to admit he hadn't been exactly honest with her, though he'd never outright lied.

That conversation with Natascha, when they'd decided to be nothing more than friends, also ranked highly on his list of most awkward moments. Most women Bruce saw got three dates or so, maybe as many as five if they were extremely persistent. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy their company or find them interesting—aside from the few who'd seemed charming on the first meeting and turned out to be shallow or vile under the surface—but drawing things out would give them impression that there was a chance of starting a serious relationship, and that was needlessly cruel.

Natascha, however, had come into his life at a time that was chaotic, to say the least, and between becoming one of Gotham's Most Wanted, dealing with Rachel's death, and trying as both Bruce and Batman to repair the city, he'd forgotten about cutting things off. Not that they'd gone out much, but they had talked, and she'd never questioned his frequent lateness or need to be out alone at night. For that, he was eternally grateful, and feeling all the guiltier about setting her aside.

He'd just begun his usual and always uncomfortable "I just don't think I'm ready for this commitment now" speech when Natascha had surprised him by cutting him off. That in itself wasn't rare, but the fact that she did so in agreement was.

"Bruce. You don't have to say it. I understand."

"…You what?" he'd managed, less than eloquently. After the surprise, his reaction had been guilt; he couldn't delude himself into thinking that he'd been good company in the past few weeks.

"I understand," she'd repeated, neither angry nor accusing. "You lost your best friend, and the city…well…" Natascha had shrugged, as much at a loss to describe it as everyone else in Gotham. "And the ballet will be leaving here soon. Besides, I don't exactly fit into your lifestyle, do I?"

She'd kept eye contact with Bruce throughout the conversation, but with the last comment, her look had become distinctly more pointed, sending anxiety skyrocketing through him. "What?"

"Bruce." She'd smiled, slightly, picking up her glass of wine but not drinking. "I know."

_Hell._ There were far better and stronger expletives that could be put to use in this situation, but he'd forgotten them all, being too focused on frantically thinking back to their interactions, to anything he could have let slip. "Know, Natascha?"

"Bruce," she'd said, for the third time. "It's all right. I've known for some time. And I'm not going to tell anyone."

By that point, his mind had all but shut down completely. He'd argued with the Joker, but he'd been prepared for the idea that one of the villains might find out. The girls he dated on the other hand, he'd barely even considered. "I—that's—it's not what you—"

She'd shaken her head, smiling faintly. "It isn't fair that you have to hide it. All the good you do for this city—your company, your charities, everything—it's unfair. But I understand. People can be so…ugly."

Bruce stopped stammering long enough to vehemently agree, if only mentally. Not that he could blame them, considering that he'd offered to take the fall, but it was still disheartening, how quickly all the good he'd done had been overlooked. He hadn't expected Natascha to feel the same, considering that she didn't know the truth behind Harvey's murders and she'd spoken against Batman long before he'd become an outcast. He wondered if she'd changed her mind when she'd realized the truth or if she'd known even then and was just playing along. Either way, even with his secret exposed, the knowledge that someone was on his side was an immense relief. "I—thank you. But Natascha, no one can _ever_ know."

"I understand," she'd said, with a small sigh. "It's just—so hypocritical. How a city like Gotham, so advanced and diverse, still holds people backwards enough to judge on something so insignificant as orientation—"

She'd gone on after that, but as that had made Bruce's head spin as badly as it had when the Joker had nailed him with a lead pipe, he missed it. "Wait. Wait. What?"

"Russia, Bruce. It's one thing for Russia not to recognize same-sex rights, but our country is not advertised as a land of hope, where anything can be accompl—"

"Natascha," he said, once he'd been able to do something with his jaw besides letting it hang open. "I don't know what you're—I'm not—"

She silenced him with a look, though not unkindly. "You don't have to hide it, Bruce. You don't have to say it if you don't want, but you don't have to pretend. The disappearance at night, the lack of interest in me and any other girl, leaving in that plane from the boat. I've known ever since then, Bruce. And I'm not going to judge you."

How long they carried on that way, with Bruce muttering half-formed excuses and Natascha giving sad little smiles and going on as if he hadn't spoken, he wasn't sure. All he knew for certain was that at the end of the night, he hadn't been able persuade her to believe otherwise, and Alfred had later convinced him that, as long as it protected his true secret, that was for the best. And while they had communicated since and become real friends, and that was the primary reason Natascha had agreed to say Bruce was with her, he had to wonder how much of her was still pitying poor Bruce Wayne, having to hide his relationships instead of parading them around as he did with women.

Not that he explained any of this to Jonathan. It would only lead to a blank stare, a sarcastic remark, or a psychoanalysis of his sexuality and how the Batman persona was clearly compensating for something. Rather, he just let the man finish eating, and then headed back to the master bedroom, waiting for the cover of darkness before he patrolled the city.

* * *

Jonathan had been hoping that spending the better part of a day separated from the Batman would have helped to overcome this infuriating need for companionship.

He'd been wrong.

Thus instead of remaining in the library and steadfastly ignoring the Bat, as he'd hoped for, he found himself taking several books and relocating to the vigilante's bedroom. How perfectly humiliating. The disappointment of the phone lines being cut wasn't helping in the least, and nor was the realization that he was quickly running out of options.

He wondered if the mansion still had Internet access. Even if it did, he didn't know any of the fellow inmates' email address, and his work account—his only account—had long since been closed, so it wasn't as if Leland or one of the other doctors would believe a random email claiming to be from Jonathan Crane trapped in Wayne Manor. Even if they traced the IP address, it was sure to be written off as some playboy joke. If he had access to a digital camera, he could photograph himself to prove it, but the Batman had surely hidden anything that could be used to take pictures by this point.

Reading Lacan was complicated already, and even more so in French. Reading it that way while his mind was racing was all but impossible, so after an hour or so he gave up, pacing the room out of boredom. The Batman didn't look up, but Jonathan knew there would be no point in running.

God, how he hated this room. Even the commonplace objects every bedroom should have, like the dresser and bed, were obviously disgustingly expensive. It wasn't fair that a man who stalked others through the night and beat them senseless got to come home and sleep on sheets of Egyptian cotton that probably had a thread count somewhere in the thousands. Especially when he hadn't had to work a day in his life for it all.

One object sitting on the dresser stood out, however. Not due to finery or expensive. In fact, quite the opposite. Jonathan stared for some time, trying to figure out its purpose, and then some time after that, trying to tell himself that he didn't care enough to go and ask the Batman, and that he'd rather die than ask.

The next thing he knew, he'd lifted up the twisted, mutated case and was walking toward the bed. Curiosity killed the cat, as he'd often heard. Hopefully, the satisfaction would bring it back, or at least ward off the self-disgust.

"What is this?" he forced himself to ask, holding out the blacked, bent remains of what had once been a stethoscope.

* * *

AN: Everyone remember Bruce's dad's stethoscope in the wreckage of Wayne Manor? I imagine he kept it.

Anyone else think that disappearing in a plane from the boat full of Russian ballerinas would raise a lot of suspicion from them?


	20. Communication

AN: So in addition to living Murphy's Law, I'm now living Chekov's Gun (If there's a gun over the mantle in act one, it had better go off by act three). I say this because while shopping for the costume fabric, my grandmother who's helping me construct it overestimated the amount of fabric we'd need and remarked that we'd bought enough to do two. As fate would have it, we ended up reversing the colors by mistake and I (idiotically) didn't notice until we'd altered it to the point where we couldn't just rip the seams out and fix it. And I'm far too much of a perfectionist to be Harley's mirror image.

So now my grandmother, being the saint that she is, is helping me construct a second one. Which she wasn't at all enthused about until I agreed to do the seam ripping on the former to get more fabric and she realized that we shouldn't have to buy much more *knock on wood*. She really is the best grandmother ever.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

He knew why he'd asked. It was the same reason children put their hand on the stove after being told not to. It wasn't that they didn't realize, at least in some cases, that the results would be unpleasant—and there was no way a conversation with the Batman could be anything besides unpleasant. It was the morbid curiosity. Getting burned still seemed, in the moments before the pain fully registered, worth the price of knowing the effects.

Why he was so curious about a burned stethoscope and its melted case, Jonathan wasn't entirely sure. But it seemed so out of place in the room that he had to ask.

He knew why he'd asked. The only thing he had no idea on was what answer he'd been expecting. It was one of the first times he'd begun a conversation with the Bat that hadn't been intended to insult, or to request something, or inquire information that was either relevant to his immediate wellbeing or an escape attempt. He wasn't sure how the Batman would respond. If it had been him, he would have ignored the other entirely, or said something blatantly false or calculated to provoke.

As such, he had especially no idea how to respond when, instead of doing any of those things, the Batman put the laptop that he'd been holding to the side, sat up, and very, very gently, put his hands on Jonathan's.

He started, though only barely. Whether that was from shock or fear of being struck if he moved, even Jonathan didn't know. His mind was too busy racing to figure out what was going on to devote time to contemplating his own motives. And the grey matter that should have been focused on doing that was distracted with being overwhelmed by the sensation.

It felt—it felt _not _like how being touched by the Batman had always felt. That being tight and controlling, if not outright painful. Given that the over ninety percent of their contact was grounded in fighting, subduing, or forcibly leading, almost always on the Bat's part, that wasn't surprising. The only exceptions he could think of were the Batman putting a hand on his forehead, and disinfecting his wound when he'd shot himself in the hand, and both of those times he'd been too panicked to register the sensation. Holding his hand after being put in the bath didn't count, as he was so desperate for reassurance at that point that _anything _would have been comforting. Jonathan could have dipped his hand in gasoline and torched it, and still have been happy at the warmth of the flames.

As for the Bat's claim that Jonathan had held onto him while psychotic; he refused to believe that, seemingly genuine memories aside. His body may betray him in sleep, but not while conscious. Madness or not.

This touch, however, was neither tight nor forcing, and despite never really feeling it from the Batman before, it felt familiar. It took Jonathan a second to realize why; this was the way contact with his friends felt. Harley and Isley and Nigma and Tetch, and even the Joker, in his nice moments, had this sort of gentleness to their movements.

He'd just had time to register that and be stunned all over again when, just as softly, the Batman pulled Jonathan's hands open and took the case.

"It was my father's."

Ordinarily, Jonathan would already be running some inner commentary on how typical that was, how the Bat had only grasped lightly out of concern for an object, and not a human being. As it was, he was distracted by the statement. "Your father's?"

"He was a doctor." The Batman's eyes weren't on him, or even the case, but somewhere far off. Something about seeing such a human expression on the man's face was both frightening and intriguing.

His words, on the other hand, stayed as confusing as ever. "A doctor ran Wayne Enterprises?"

"He left the running to the board, for the most part." His voice had that faraway sound as well. Jonathan tried to imagine what the Bat's father must have been like. There was no doubt that the Waynes had helped the city, at least in death, from what he'd learned of the city's history from Ra's Al Ghul and his own research, but he had a hard time imagining what sort of parents could have created the Batman. Then again, their deaths had surely been the man's driving force, so perhaps it wasn't their influence as much as the trauma of the murder.

He wondered what it would be like to have parents that he actually cared for. Witnessing his great-grandmother's death hadn't exactly urged him to don ashes and sackcloth.

Then he shook the thought away. Sympathy for the devil was still dealing with the devil, and the fact that the Batman's eyes misted over at the memory of his parents didn't change the fact that Jonathan was a captive at the hands of the person who'd done just as much damage to him as his great-grandmother, and probably more. And by the sound of things, the Bat's father had been much the same as his son, leaving decisions up to others while gaining the wealth.

Though he had been a doctor, so at least he'd helped people instead of doing whatever it was the Batman did all day before slinking off into the night to frighten people witless. Which, admittedly, he was talented at. If Jonathan hadn't hated him so much, he'd be very interested in studying the Batman's methods, as he'd wanted to before the poisoning. The thought of doing so now was rather soiled by the horrific brain damage. Besides, the Bat's approach seemed to consist entirely of lurking in the shadows before diving out and manhandling his way to victory, in Jonathan's experience.

"I found it in the wreckage after the fire," the Bat said, almost to himself.

"And you kept it?"

"Yes." He sounded almost defensive, as if protecting the memento verbally as well as physically. "It's one of the only things that didn't go up in smoke. Not fully."

His immediate thought was _So?_ Unsurprising, given that the only member of his own family that he was on speaking terms with was his sister, and she hadn't known how to talk when he'd last seen her. He somehow doubted she'd want to associate with her older brother, the mad criminal, now that she was old enough to understand such things. Which was good, really, because he never wanted to be near his mother again.

Of course it would turn out that the man who had everything he'd ever wanted had also had the sort of family worth keeping mementos of, even if they were melted and blackened and absolutely useless. Life was a bitch, as the saying went. Though the Bat had lost his parents, as well as that Dawes woman who'd been such a thorn in his side. There was that.

The look on the Batman's face, however, made it hard to take pleasure in his losses.

* * *

Bruce realized, amidst the memories of far happier, less stressful times, that he was taking a nostalgia trip in front of the man who'd slammed an alarm clock into his head when last he'd been distracted and forced himself to snap out of it.

Jonathan wasn't search for potential weapons, instead sitting opposite Bruce on the bed and staring at him with an expression more curious than hateful, for once. Well, he had been a psychiatrist, though he'd violated every doctor's oath Bruce had ever heard of. Psychosis aside, he had been unnervingly adept in bringing the Joker partly around, but being analyzed by the Scarecrow wasn't exactly something Bruce wanted to experience.

He tried returning the stare with one of those pointed "I'm looking at you" glances, the sort that usually had the intended effect of making the other turn away awkwardly. With Jonathan Crane, it had no discernable result. Either it had gone over his head completely or he was ignoring it.

Bruce guessed it was the former. For all the man's brilliance and understanding of the emotions of others, from what he'd witnessed, Jonathan was clueless about human interaction, to the point where it was almost ridiculous that he'd been able to fool the rest of the Arkham staff for as long as he had. Though a large part of his tactlessness might be due to his hatred of Batman. Whatever the reason, it was uncomfortable. Jonathan Crane, due to their prolonged interactions and the fact that the other lost his reservation to talk while psychotic, was the villain Bruce had seen at his most human, the most often.

And if seeing the Joker's humanity had taught him anything, it was not to get too close.

"You don't have anything like that?" he asked, to break the silence.

Jonathan straightened, and looked at him as opposed to staring. "What?"

He lifted the case slightly. "That."

"No."

"Nothing at all?"

Jonathan's eyebrows slanted down, a bit. "No. Even if I did, it's all either locked in Arkham storage or somewhere in my last apartment. But I don't need to hold onto things that serve no purpose to function."

Bruce considered asking just what logical function all the man's Stephen King novels and zombie films served, but decided against it. They were talking somewhat civilly now, and he'd rather not reverse that. It made life easier, if only just. "They haven't cleared out your apartment?"

A smirk. "No."

"You still make the landlords phobic of the apartment, then?"

"Of the apartment _number_. If it was the room itself then it would generalize to all the others. A number is usually specific enough to keep that from happening, though they may still any room with say, a nineteen, if there was one in the number. But if they're on speaking terms with the tenants in those rooms, that should help to discriminate the—" He cut off abruptly, glancing at Bruce.

"Yes?"

His expression, which had relaxed when he spoke on fear, changed to a look reminiscent of a small child, one who was angry at his mother but still eating the cookies she baked. That sort of "I just remembered that I'm not speaking to you" glance. "Nothing."

"No, really. What were you going to say?" He wanted to hear Jonathan go on about terrorizing people about as much as he'd wanted to hear the Joker's speeches on his similarities with Batman, but if it kept communications civil, he was willing to listen or at least tune it out.

Besides, the knowledge could be useful, at some point. Knowing the criminals' methods almost always was.

"Discriminate the stimuli. Shouldn't you be out horrifying people or something?"

It took him a moment to realize what the man was talking about. It still stung, knowing that some saw only the monster and not the human underneath, madness aside. He glanced to the window. Some time in between reviewing corporate information and explaining the stethoscope, darkness had fallen. "If you want to call it that, then yes. Yes, I should."

He stood, returning the stethoscope to its place before he left the room. Jonathan trailed behind him, and from what he could see of the man's expression as he crossed him going out the door, he looked mildly alarmed, as if he hadn't been expecting Bruce to go.

Upon further reflection, Bruce chalked it up to his imagination.

* * *

AN: Those of you who've read Scarecrow's origin comic probably recall that his only interaction with his sister was threatening to shoot her, so he's not on the best terms with her either. However, my Jonathan isn't entirely based on that comic (his mother being around if negligent in childhood, and so on) mostly due to my not having that comic at the time I started my first fic. So it's another of my differences.


	21. Meanwhile

AN: Yes, I know the Joker's injuries weren't this bad when last we saw him. Don't worry, all will be explained. The siblings Abigail, Anika, and Adrian are characters from one of my previous fics, _Act Like We Are Fools. _Abigail is the Joker's tailor and Adrian is his doctor.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"It's like Ozymandias, you know." The Joker lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Well, the ceiling for the most part; right down the center of his vision ran a metal bar affixed over the bed that he could grab if he wanted to sit up. He tended not to do that, as it added stress to his legs, plastered and elevated in traction to reduce the pressure on them, and that hurt in a way that wasn't amusing at all.

Besides, there wasn't much point in sitting up if he could rely on his caretakers to fetch anything he wanted. They were a lot like his henchmen, only less stupid. For the most part.

"From that poem by, uh, Shelley. Ozymandias. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But his monument is in ruins, and deserted besides. That's what this is like." It made perfect sense to him, though he didn't bother to say it out loud. Trapped like this, all the fear and chaos he'd caused would slowly disintegrate, and he would be forgotten. It was obvious to anyone who wasn't an idiot.

Anika, apparently, was an idiot, because she only gave him a confused look and glanced back down at her cards. "Got any threes?"

The Joker gave a loud moan and let his head fall back against the pillow. "I can't take this anymore."

"I told you to tell me as soon as you needed the bedpan."

"Not _that_, idiot." He threw the cards at her face, without managing to inflict so much as a paper cut. Damn it. "Jokers don't thrive in captivity! I need to be moving, outside, _anywhere_ but this godforsaken apartment."

She stood, taking care not to jolt the complicated pulley system strung up around him. "Well, I hope you've learned your lesson about following Adrian's orders. "Don't walk around too much" doesn't mean "strap rollerblades to your casts and—""

"Skates," he snapped. He was really starting to hate everything about her, from her pixie haircut to her high-tops to her habit of talking far too loud to compensate for her hearing loss. "They were _skates_. Much more stable."

"Obviously not." She bent to pick up the cards on the floor.

"You little bitch," he muttered, too low for her to pick up on. "You stupid bitch. When I get out of this, I'm going to cut you open and use your intestines as a jump rope, and—"

"You touch my sister and you'll have lost yourself the only tailor and doctor in this city that are willing to get within a hundred yards of you."

The Joker raised his head to find Adrian in the doorway. Bastard. If he weren't so good at treating injuries—and if the Joker had been able to get up—both he and his sisters would have been dead long ago. "You'd risk losing your only source of income?"

"You're not, actually, and yes. My neutrality to your crimes doesn't extend to the twins."

As if on cue, Abigail strode past her brother and into the room, her Batman doll in hand. The Joker felt his eye twitch. "What the hell is that for?"

"You, of course." She placed it on the bed beside him, her smile not faltering in the least as he knocked it off the bed. Anika, still shuffling around for the cards—he'd managed to upend the whole deck—placed it back beside him without looking. "Come on, Jackie, don't be like that."

He pulled the pillow over his head. One of them was bad enough with a captive audience. All three, and it became like those situations in the Marx Brothers movies in which they took as many people as they could and put them in a tiny room. Like that, only verbally. "Not my name."

"It's the name you gave us." Anika that time. He could tell by the volume of her voice. She really ought to get better hearing aids. Or just shut up, if those were doing the best that could be done. If he'd been the toxin-fueled psycho who'd slammed her against the wall, he'd have been thorough about the head trauma.

"I lied." His legs shifted—Adrian must be adjusting the pulleys—and he shoved his face further into the pillow. So what if it smeared his makeup into a pinkish-gray mess? It was better than whimpering in front of them.

Now someone was tugging on his sleeve. He felt long hair brushing against his hand. Abigail, then. He forced himself to remain stoic and threw the pillow to one side. "What are you doing?"

"Fixing your sleeve. I don't know why you insist on wearing your overcoat in bed. Do you know how wrinkled it's gotten?"

"So? I've got like twelve." He swatted her hand away. "Unable to stand" was not synonymous with "Barbie doll" and she need to learn that difference.

"Still." Abigail bent over him, straightening his lapels. There was a ring of bruising around her neck, just visible over the collar of her shirt, yellowed and fading. That was a gift from him, from earlier in the week when he'd just woken up to find himself in traction, and had shown her exactly how he felt about that. The memory gave him a smile, but not much else. "Have you ever considered plaid?"

"What?"

She pulled on the coat again. "Plaid."

"In varying shades of purple?" Anika asked, sitting beside them. Her movement on the bed made the Joker's legs sway, ever so slightly, and he bit back the urge to slam her upside the head for it. "That might be really cute, actually—"

"Absolutely not. Get out of here before I kill you both."

"You'd have to get up first." Adrian, finally through with the hell he'd been inflicting, straightening up, looking down at him. "Are you hungry?"

"I want a filet mignon."

Anika got up to stand beside her brother in the doorway. "I'll get you a burger."

"Your cooking sucks." All right, so he wasn't exhibiting symptoms of scurvy for the first time in a while, but just because it had nutritional value, that didn't make it _good._ Anyway, she insisted on cutting his food into bite sizes pieces for him, which was patronizing and infuriating and brought her closer to the top of his kill list every time she did it.

"You like my cookies."

"They were burnt last time."

"You were distracting her," Abigail admonished, nodding toward the wire on the wall that had connected to an electronic buzzer on the bed. That had been up for one day before Adrian had taken a scalpel to it. He had something against being called in at two in the morning to hear knock-knock jokes, apparently.

"What's your point?"

"Keep being rude and you won't get any dessert," Anika said, as her brother shook his head at the situation and left the room. Why couldn't the twins follow suit? This was every bit as unfair as the living arrangement with the Bat had been.

"Your desserts suck too."

"It's not cookies this time." She crossed her arms. "It's strawberry shortcake. Made the good way. So there."

Subdued by the promise of strawberries, the Joker bit his lip to the point of drawing blood. Staying silent was that hard. He expected it was due to cabin fever. There was a light pressure against his chest, and he turned his head away from Anika to find Abigail pressing the Batman doll there.

"You miss him, don't you?"

Of all the idiotic questions. Of course he missed the Batman. The last thing he needed was some girl that he'd only let live due to her skill with a needle asking him about it. She didn't understand it. No one did, not even the rest of the Arkham gang. Harley, with her obsessive need for the Joker, and Jonny, with his attachment to the voice in his head, were the two that came closest, but the connection between the Joker and the Batman was something that went beyond any human understanding. The Joker didn't just need the Batman to survive; it was _because _of Batsy that the Joker existed to begin with.

The majority of his life he couldn't recall, the places where memories should have resided covered or wiped away by a sea of white noise. Of what little remained clear, a bit of it took place before Batman first appeared in Gotham City, before he'd first heard the story of the costumed man who'd stopped a drug pickup on the docks, but it wasn't until the name "Batman" had first entered his mind that any of that started to _matter._ His memory before that time was actually black and white, when he cared to reflect on it, a sure sign if any that the Bat had breathed life into a corpse with his presence alone.

The Joker owed his life to the Batman. Without that push, that inspiration, he'd be as lifeless as all the other stiffs wandering the streets of Gotham. Dead inside, or until he could bring them to life by bringing them to his way of thinking. But even those who'd embraced chaos and anarchy could never be a companion like Bats. A Technicolor person was still just a person, and he and his Bat were above that.

At least, for the most part.

The thorn in his side was Bruce Wayne.

_Bruce Wayne. _The name itself sent rivulets of pain through the Joker, a pain far deeper than anything physical he'd felt in his life. Every time he heard that damn name, he was overcome, if only for a split second, with the urge to slam his head against the nearest hard surface, to beat the knowledge of the other half out, as he'd tried to do when he'd first realized Batsy's identity, months ago. But try as he had, he couldn't remove the fact from his mind, burrowed there like dirt in an oyster.

Bruce Wayne should have been nothing. He was a man, nothing more. Boring and grey as everyone else on the planet until he slid the cowl over his head and became the Joker's creator, the closest thing to a divine authority the Clown Prince of Crime would ever accept—aside from himself, of course. Bruce Wayne was the vessel that held a god, as Jesus's body had held God on Earth, should one subscribe to Christianity. A tool, nothing greater.

All of that, unfortunately, was theoretical. Because where the prior owner of the Joker's own vessel had died when the clown took over, Bruce Wayne had remained. Restraining the Batman, keeping him in check. The dam that kept the flood from spilling over and bringing beautiful chaos. No man should have that power over the unwavering symbol of justice, keeping him reined on the fine line between control and chaos.

But Bruce Wayne did.

And for that, the Joker had to kill him.

Not physically, obviously. Despite what any psychobabbling idiot with a doctorate would spout when given their fifteen minutes of fame on the evening news, the Joker wasn't out of contact with reality. Certainly he knew that killing the body would destroy the entire being. But there was more than one way to destroy a person. Harvey Dent was proof of that. He would find Bruce Wayne's weaknesses, the little breaks in the armor, and pull them wide open, carving away until nothing was left but his Bat, as it should be.

The dirt in the oyster at least formed something of value. In this case, the knowledge of who to target to make sure nothing would ever stand between him and Batman again.

As soon as he could get up, anyway.

"Really, I'm not talking about, like, flannel plaid," Abigail was saying, turning up the edge of his vest to stare at the seams or something. "A classy plaid. It'd be a change. Don't you get tired of wearing the same thing every day?"

She was off in her own world, as she often became when designing, he'd noticed. Anika, on his other side, apparently felt the same way, and moved to switch her hearing aids off.

All right, so killing Bruce Wayne was second on his to do list. First, he was going to repay these idiots for all this suffering. He heard someone clearing their throat from the doorway, and raised his head. Adrian stood, car keys in hand.

"Where are you going?" the Joker asked, over Abigail's mutterings.

"To the store. To get steak," Adrian added, before the Joker could ask.

Well, they did keep finding little ways to redeem themselves. Maybe he'd settle for maiming them after all.

* * *

_Ozymandias _is a sonnet by Percy Shelley, regarding happening across a fallen monument to a king.

Somewhere on Youtube there is footage of a night club performer dressed as the Joker lipsynching to "Smooth Criminal" and "Disturbia." His coat is plaid and it, like him, is fabulous.

"The good way" to make strawberry shortcake, at least where I'm concerned, it s to make the shortcake by itself, leaving out the strawberries and whipped cream and all, and putting a slice in a bowl. The strawberry are pureed and poured on top, along with milk, and it's eaten that way. Done like that, it's more of a bread pudding than a cake, and it's fantastic.


	22. Questions

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan returned to the bedroom once the Batman had disappeared through his ridiculous hidden door. Not the guest room, but the master. The Bat hadn't bothered to lock or even close the door behind them on the way out. Idiot. Not that Jonathan could escape without detection from any room, thanks to the ankle bracelet, and he was sure the man had the sense to keep any potential weapons under lock and key, but he could still do damage if he wanted. He could, if he was so inclined, retrieve the remains of that stethoscope and finish the job the fire had started.

He was not so inclined—or so suicidal—however, so the stethoscope remained safe. Jonathan's attention was entirely focused on the laptop sitting on the bed. He sat and opened it, switching it on and waiting for the machine to come to life.

He wasn't sure if the GPD had any sort of email system or not. Certainly they weren't going to have one for emergencies—who'd waste time typing out an email instead of calling 911?—but they had to have _something _they could be contacted online for. That was his expectation, anyway. He could only hope that a message sent about being Bruce Wayne's captive would be taken seriously, and not laughed off. Were the police required to check out any report of a crime, no matter how ludicrous? He had no idea. In a city like Gotham, probably not.

But it was the only hope he had.

He turned his head away from the slowly loading screen, which did nothing to settle the "I may be sick at any second" feeling twisting inside of him. And without so much as a Bat to vomit on. This was his last chance. The last thing he'd conceived of, at least. If it failed, he could truly be trapped.

The Joker, damn him, had been right. Jonathan was going to be stuck here forever, unless he took initiative and found a way out. Only he had taken initiative, twice now, and it hadn't worked. Scarecrow might be able to find a way, but Scarecrow was locked up in his own little world, and Jonathan didn't have the key. It wasn't a question of Jonathan's stability, not anymore. Considering the circumstances, he was being incredibly stable. No, it was a punishment. And while he couldn't say that he didn't deserve punishment, it seemed to him that the amount he was receiving was disproportionate to the transgression.

He glanced back to the screen of the laptop. It was asking for a password.

_Of course._ He should have seen it coming. It wasn't as if being inches from freedom without being able to reach it was something new. He forced himself to suppress the urge to scream, or to break the damn machine in half. Another failed attempt, and at the moment, his stressed mind couldn't produce any others. So he was trapped here, trapped until he died or the Batman found some horrible way to silence him, or until boredom or time itself drew his other half back to him.

He wasn't sure if the last one would happen, or how long it would take if it did. Scarecrow had never been this angry before. Not at him.

He glanced back to the laptop. No. There was no point. This wasn't any playboy billionaire's computer. The Batman would be too smart to make it as simple as his parent's names, or his own, or something simple. It would either be a random conglomeration of letters and numbers that Jonathan would never be able to work out, or a completely random word or phrase that was similarly unsolvable. If he had gone with something that had personal meaning to him, it would be completely obscure and something he'd never told anyone.

Still, even if the odds of him guessing the correct password were a trillion to one, there was always a chance, no matter how rare. As he'd said to the Batman, better to have tried and failed.

Bruce Wayne's name didn't work, nor any reassembling of it, and neither did the butler's, though Jonathan only knew the first name to try there. "Thomas Wayne" and "Martha Wayne" also failed to gain access, and their names together had no effect. Of course no variants on "bat" or "Batman" brought anything up. After that, he was at a loss. He knew the year of the Batman's birth, because he knew the year the Waynes were murdered and what age their son had been then, but he didn't know the date or month, so he couldn't enter the birth date. Similarly, he didn't know the parents' dates or anniversary, or the exact date of their deaths, which he highly doubted the Batman would use anyway.

He did know the exact date of Rachel Dawes's death, having heard about it from two gossiping nurses in Arkham's cafeteria the following date. He recalled thinking that was something he'd remember forever, brushing his hand over the taser scar, and silently raising his glass in thanks to the Joker, whom he hadn't yet met.

Her death date didn't work, and he hadn't expected it to. By that point, the low battery light by the laptop's keyboard had started flashing—must not have been all that charged when the Batman had turned it off—so he gave up and shut it down.

Almost at once that godforsaken sense of longing was back.

"Longing" was the only word for it, much as he hated to admit it. He wasn't lonely for the Batman, just for some form of contact, but the Batman was the only contact he had. He doubted, based on his encounter with the Bat's butler, that the man would appreciate being followed around every minute of every day forever. And a man who could talk back to the Joker was not someone he wanted to unnecessarily annoy.

So he was stuck here, missing the Bat and hating himself for it.

How long did he spend lurking the streets of Gotham each night, anyway? He seemed to leave the manor or stop partying when darkness fell—around ten or so, at this time of year—and apparently, he went to Wayne Enterprises most days when there weren't extenuating circumstances, and the latest he'd run into the Batman was somewhere after one in the morning, so around five hours? Though his friends had sometimes been delivered to Arkham at closer to five.

_Wait, that can't be right._ That would be two hours of sleep or less. If he was running around all night and working on top of it, his heart would have given out by now. The late, late nights must be exceptions to the rule. It must be closer to two, usually. Which was still excessive, now that Jonathan considered it. He didn't sleep much either, unless he forced himself past the insomnia, either out of boredom or duress, but when he stayed up, he was reading or making toxin. The most strenuous things he'd ever done at night were experiments or drug deals, or running from the Bat.

How on Earth could someone go charging around all night, getting into violent fights, and still be ready to go on the bare minimum of sleep the next day? He'd never much considered it before he'd discovered the Batman's identity—the vigilante had always seemed supernatural, though intellectually Jonathan knew otherwise—but now it made absolutely no sense. True, he probably didn't do much of anything at Wayne Enterprises, aside from sitting around and looking important, but a person could only run himself ragged for so long before the body refused to cooperate.

_What difference does it make?_ Jonathan shook the thoughts away, rolling back his overlarge sleeves for what felt like—and probably was—the nine thousandth time that day. If the Batman wanted to damage himself, more power to him. With any luck, he'd die or be grievously injured, and then—

He froze, tensing suddenly and forcefully enough to shake the mattress. _If the Batman dies, what happens to me?_

* * *

He hadn't been expecting to find Jonathan Crane lying on his bed when he came home.

It occurred to Bruce as he stood in the doorway, feeling oddly like an intruder in his own bedroom, that he should have stopped expecting any sort of normalcy in life by now. Life as Batman and with the League of Shadows had never really been normal, though they had fallen into routine. Any level of normalcy he had achieved upon returning to Gotham was gone the instant the Joker had revealed that he knew Bruce's secret, and maybe even before that, when he had first let him into the cave. And if he wanted to go far, far back, life as a billionaire's child wasn't exactly normal, though it was the only thing he'd ever known.

Still, there ought to be some order to the universe. Order that didn't leave his enemies snuggling him and then pretending it hadn't happened, or sprawled on his bed, reading Edgar Allen Poe. "What are you doing?"

"At the moment?" Jonathan ran a hand through already-tousled hair. "Trying to distract myself with _The Fall of the House of Usher._ And it's not working."

He thought it best not to ask what Jonathan was trying to distract himself from, given the other's behavior. Bruce had never seen someone who could make lying down look so tense before. "And you're doing this on my bed?"

"I was freezing. Do you live in this mansion, or store meat in it?"

"It's not that cold."

"I disagree." He turned a page, then another, without so much as glancing at the text in between. Now that Bruce considered it, Jonathan did have almost no body fat to speak of, and usually wore layers. Thinking about the proper insulation of supervillains. This was what his life had become.

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. That seemed to be happening a lot lately.

_This is ridiculous._ The night had been completely disappointing, he was no closer to finding the Joker than he'd been when he first lost him—at least the clown seemed to be lying low, but that could only mean he was planning something truly horrible—and he'd been hit hard more times than he cared to admit by an untrained drug addict during a bust. Damn methamphetamines and their tendency to cause paranoia and violence. All he wanted was to sleep, in his own bed. Without a psychopath on top of it.

He cleared his throat. "So, why exactly—"

"What happens if you die?"

Yet another thing he hadn't been expecting. Bruce stared. "What?"

"To me," he clarified, sitting up. Bruce ought to be used to how young he looked by now, but the wide-eyedness and the disheveled hair made it strikingly apparent all over again. "If you get—I don't know, shot or maimed or something. Something that kills you. What happens to me?"

Of all the questions to be faced with when he was sleep-deprived. Not that contemplating his demise was ever a welcome activity. "What brought this on?"

"Don't change the subject." There was a shake to Jonathan's voice that he couldn't quite keep hidden. "You're the one who's supposed to be prepared for anything. So what's your preparation for that?"

He had a point there, much as Bruce wished he didn't. Batman was supposed to have a plan for everything. "Everything," however, had stopped being everything when this "villains in the house" fiasco had started. The Joker going catatonic tended to do that for you.

"I hadn't th—"

"Well, _do_." The book in his hands closed with a loud snap. "I—I don't want to end up rotting in your cave for all eternity because _you _couldn't be bothered to tell your butler what to do with me after you finally got blown to pieces or beaten to death or whatever. "

"That wouldn't happen." Why would Alfred keep Jonathan imprisoned after Bruce's death? That was the entire point of the captivity; to keep his identity from being exposed. He wondered how shaken up Jonathan had to be, not to have realized that.

"I'm _your _responsibility, Batman. Neither of us asked for it, but that's how it is." His icy eyes were burning, with irritation and fear and something else Bruce couldn't quite place. "You—you can't just race off into the night without thinking about the results your actions have. I don't—I can't stay here forever. I can't be locked up alone forever."

"You'd go back to Arkham." He said it quickly, and without thinking, hoping the words would do more good than harm. Jonathan seemed on the verge of a panic attack, and the last thing they needed was another of those. "All right? You'd go back there."

Thankfully, Jonathan seemed to relax at that. Strange, considering how much he hated the institution, but then, he almost certainly hated being stuck with his worst enemy more. "And your butler knows that?"

Bruce glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Behind the cracked plastic—Jonathan had hit him hard with that—the digital display recorded the time as just before two-thirty. "I'll tell him when he's awake."

"See that you do."

Amazing, how he could go from panicked one second to mostly restrained and condescending the next. "You know, I'm not planning to get myself killed or anything. Actually, that's something I'd like to avoid."

"You'd better avoid it. Do you have any idea where that would leave me—" He cut himself off, his expression shifting again, this time to shock. Presumably, at his own words

Bruce's reaction was similar. _Was that…concern?_ No. Of course not. Concern for himself, if anything. Still, suppose his kneejerk reaction had been right? Was that a sign that his attempts at a truce were working, or just that Jonathan had become codependent on him as a replacement for the Joker? Bruce couldn't help but be reminded of the clown's words about narcissists and attention; how they craved it no matter whom it came from or the manner in which it was given.

And supposing it was the former, Bruce couldn't decide how that sat with him.

Well, there was a time and a place to contemplate the implications of "befriending" the Scarecrow, and it wasn't three in the morning on a weeknight. "Want to go back to the guest room?"

Jonathan, cheeks gone pink and head down, didn't respond. Hopefully, this time it was from embarrassment, and not another loss of contact with the world.

Bruce held in a sigh and walked to the bed. "Come on."

He held out a hand, intending it as a summoning gesture.

Jonathan interpreted it differently, it would seem, and took Bruce's hand in his own.

Another silence. This one lasted only seconds but seemed far longer. Then Jonathan jerked his hand back as if he'd been burned, all but leaping from the bed and taking off down the hall, with Bruce following him for once. He wouldn't respond to Bruce's voice or even acknowledge his presence, and his face had gone so red it was almost alarming.

Bruce wasn't sure if he should consider this a step forward, or a movement several miles back.


	23. Persistence

AN: Today I'm exhausted from blood loss. Local Culver's was doing a "pint for a pint" exchange: give the Red Cross a pint of blood, and you get a pint of frozen custard. I couldn't resist.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The water was hot enough to be painful on contact, filling the bathroom with steam almost instantly. Jonathan could barely see his own feet through the stuff, though given that he didn't have his glasses on, that wasn't so much of an accomplishment. He could see, albeit blurrily, how the water was turning his skin a scalded reddish shade.

Good. The only time water worked as a coping mechanism for him was when it was near boiling—his traumatic experiences had always involved cold water—when it wasn't collected in large quantities, and when he had control over it. So only in a shower, really. It wouldn't stay warm long, considering how high it was turned up, and the temperature was almost dangerous, but he found it more relaxing than anything else.

The relaxation brought on the fatigue that his fear and self-disgust had kept at bay. It occurred to him that showering at odd hours of the night was almost hypocritical, after his disgust and intrigue at how much the Batman deprived himself of sleep. But he couldn't force himself to get out and lie down. There were too many thoughts racing through his head, and he didn't want to be left alone with them. The water was acting as white noise now, helping to filter some of it.

Longing was one thing. One _terrible _thing, but understandable if deplorable. Physical contact, physical contact that _he _had initiated while in his right mind, even if he hadn't thought about it until it was too late, that was another thing entirely, and that, as the Joker may have said it, with his odd ability to make certain words sound capitalized, was a Very Bad Thing. An Even Worse Thing, once he took into account that he'd done it without thinking. A need for the presence of another human was…acceptable. It was a basic need. Even craving physical contact was understandable. Animals raised in isolation without being touched, even if they were given more than enough nourishment, produced few growth hormones and had a high chance of premature death. It wasn't unusual to want to be touched, especially in this situation.

But craving something and giving into it were two very different things, as anyone who'd ever been on a diet could attest to. Needing attention and the like, he could understand. Maybe not forgive, as someone as controlled as himself should be able to ignore it, but comprehend at least.

Acting on it, though, that was something he could never forgive himself for.

_I touched the Batman. I _touched _the _Batman. He imagined this was how his obsessive-compulsive patients had felt when they mentioned having repeating thoughts that they couldn't shake. It managed to be upsetting, annoying, and distracting all at the same time. And the constant dwelling on wasn't doing a thing to alleviate the sense of defilement he felt. He actually felt stained, as if with the soul-blackening sin his great-grandmother had told him about at every opportunity. Like an oil slick, only made of misery as opposed to nonrenewable resources.

He wasn't stupid, though nearly all of his recent actions would suggest the contrary. He was a psychiatrist, and a brilliant one, and he hadn't deluded himself into ignoring what was going on. He recognized the signs. The compulsive need to be in the Batman's presence. The anxiety whenever the man left. His dependence on the Batman alone and the anxiety at the thought of turning to the manor's third occupant instead. All that and the thousand other things he couldn't hide from himself, much as he longed to.

They all pointed to an attachment disorder.

It was…pathetic. That was the only way to describe it. Any mental disorder was beneath him, but especially one so weak. If it had been Stockholm Syndrome, it wouldn't have been as bad. Stockholm developed as a life or death response. It was logical, as much as a disorder could be. But it couldn't be Stockholm, because Stockholm needed abuse and constant threat of death or harm, and the victim couldn't be aware of the disorder. And Stockholm created a twisted kind of love. He might desire the Batman's attention, even need it to function well, but that was a far, far cry from feeling affection.

Jonathan would rather drink drain cleaner than feel affection for the man who had destroyed everything he'd accomplished in life in one breath.

The water coming down on him was suddenly cold. Lukewarm, to be more accurate, but enough to jolt him out of his reverie. How long he'd stood under the water, he wasn't sure. The mirror had fogged over, but considering the temperature he'd had the water on, it had probably been like that from the first minute on.

Damn the Batman and damn his nice and expensive towels. This whole attachment nonsense might be must easier to shake if the manor wasn't so lovely. It was a cell, but a comfortable one. He considered pulling the sheets off the bed and making himself sleep in the cold. The last thing he needed was to become attached to anything else in this place. But the mansion had all the warmth of an ice cap, pre-ozone layer depletion—low body fat aside, it was incredibly drafty—and he didn't want to add illness or frostbite onto the ridiculously long list of issues plaguing him.

He lay under the infuriatingly soft and warm blankets and considered his options. Escape was out, until he figured out a way to remove the tracker or contact outside help. And at the rate things were going, by the time he actually accomplished either, he'd die of old age three seconds later. That wasn't to say that he was going to give up on escape—some part of him would always be focused on it, until he was either free or deceased—but he needed to explore alternatives to tie him over until he had another plan.

He refused to acknowledge the idea of being passive about things, sitting back and letting the attachment get worse. It would be going against everything he stood for, and alienating Scarecrow more than ever, and he refused to entertain the thought for longer than the time it took to pass his mind and then be immediately rejected.

What else was left? _I'm not giving in. I'm not. _It wasn't an exaggeration when he said he'd sooner die than accept the Batman's "concern" and let himself be placated, but the plans had all failed and he was out of ideas. He was out of options. It wasn't as if he could just sit back and ignore this unwanted need.

…_Then again._

All right, so his previous attempts to ignore his inability to be separate from the Batman had all crashed and burned within five seconds or so, but that was then. What precisely had changed since, he couldn't say, but clearly something had, or he wouldn't be lying here. He'd still be lurking around in the Bat's bedroom until sleep overtook him and he was carried off. But he'd left of his own volition. Before the Batman had could lead him back. He'd made the first move.

The fact that the move had only been made out of shock and that he was unable to release the thoughts of the Batman and sleep had not escaped his notice, much as he wished otherwise. But it was still a step forward. Probably. It wasn't impossible.

The last time, his silence had been out of spite. Out of denial. He'd tried convincing himself that he didn't need the Batman and failed miserably. But perhaps if he acknowledged the need, and was calmer about things, it would be easier to let go. Jonathan still considered it about as likely as having a bullet to the chest stopped by a winning lottery ticket in the front pocket, but he was at the end of the rope. It was either ignore until escape, or give in.

And he refused to let "give in" be an option.

With that decided, he firmly told himself that he was going to put the mess out of his head until the morning, sleep, and deal with things when the time came. It was an issue of mind over matter. He could do it, difficult though it would be.

An hour or two later, sleep finally took him.

* * *

It had become a habit to go to the guest bedroom before he got breakfast.

Bruce tried not to dwell on the fact that he was looking after the Scarecrow as if the man was a pet or a small child. He kept his mind on the facts of the matter instead. And the facts were these: Jonathan Crane was his captive until he found a way to fix that, Jonathan Crane had a notoriously bad track record for taking care of himself, Bruce refused to let anyone starve in front of him, regardless of personal feelings, and Jonathan Crane tended not to eat unless he was prompted to do so, at least in Bruce's experience.

The focus on the facts made it all the more surprising when he opened the door to find that the room was empty. That in itself wasn't shocking—as he hadn't bothered to lock it, the man was free to wander—but Jonathan never seemed to go anywhere out of the guest room unless he was trailing after Bruce or attempting escape. According to his cell phone—which was connected, thanks to Lucius's far superior technical skills to the GPS—Jonathan Crane was in his kitchen. Praying that all the knives and breakable objects were securely locked away, Bruce made his way there.

The knives and breakable objects appeared to still be locked away. And Jonathan Crane appeared to be eating a bowl of Cheerios.

_Stranger things_, Bruce reminded himself, though at the moment he was having trouble thinking of anything stranger. It was one thing to find the Joker doing mundane little things around the house like having breakfast. The man mixed mundane and mad on a regular basis and could probably make something as simple as making his bed look entirely unhinged. Jonathan, on the other hand, seemed to be in a constant state of overreaction, and seeing him sit calmly after the past few days was more disconcerting than it should have been.

He decided not to question welcome developments, mentally crossed his fingers in the hope that it _was _a welcome development, and sat. "Morning."

Jonathan continued to stare down at the cereal. Not in a pointed way, as his previous "I'm not looking at you, I'm not looking at you, see how much I'm _not _looking at you" mannerisms had been, but the silence was still striking. Apparently, the civil conversations from the day prior were not about to be repeated.

It was somewhat disappointing, to Bruce's surprise. He didn't particularly _want _to be on speaking terms with Jonathan, beyond the fact that it made caring for him easier. At least, he thought he hadn't. But there was a feeling that wasn't quite strong enough to be dismay at the realization of this setback.

"Do you need anything else, or is that enough?"

Jonathan started to move his eyes upward—about to roll them, no doubt—but seemed to decide against it and kept looking down. It occurred to Bruce that "Do you need anything?" was probably the question he'd asked most in the past week or so, despite the always useless responses he got. He didn't know why he kept asking, beyond that he could think of nothing else to ask, and he didn't want to leave the man in want of something.

Not that Jonathan would tell him what he wanted if he needed it. He'd told Bruce that days ago.

Well, the drop hollowed the stone not by force but by the frequency of its fall. Keeping that in mind, he ate in silence and went up the stairs to get ready for work.

He stood in front of what remained of the bathroom mirror, shaving and considering what exactly he would achieve if he ever managed to keep communications open between them. He knew why he was trying; it was Batman's job to help everyone, regardless of crimes or lack of social tact, or bitchiness. Being locked in the guest bedroom and left alone for the duration of his stay would still be better than his time spent at Arkham, but that wasn't the point. That wouldn't help, only contain.

And if Batman couldn't reach out to the people he fought, what made him any different from them?

The goal might well turn out different from the outcome, however. Suppose hell finally froze over and Jonathan Crane began speaking freely to him. Bruce was still unsure as to how that would help matters. Silent or not, Jonathan hated him, and Bruce…well, Bruce wasn't sure what his feelings were toward the man.

It wasn't a hate. It had been once, after he was exposed to the toxin and Rachel's life was on the line. It was in that hatred that he'd poisoned Jonathan Crane and left him without the antidote. But over time, the hate had faded. Not to say that there wasn't anger and resentment, because there was. For what he'd done to the city, and his patients, how he'd nearly killed Rachel, wasted his own potential, helped the Joker to slaughter the city, and all his other transgressions. But hate was too strong of a word. And mixed with that resentment, there was an odd, pessimistic hope, the one that he held for all the villains, except maybe for the Joker.

The hope that he could reform, and salvage what he could from the wreck he made of his life.

Bruce didn't expect it to happen. He'd been in Gotham City and fighting these types for too long to be an optimist. But there was always a chance, and frustrated though he may be, he couldn't hate Jonathan Crane while the chance remained.

What feelings lingered while the hate had faded, he wasn't sure. The relationships between himself and Gotham's villains were far too convoluted for even him to comprehend.

What he was sure of, however, was that when he checked the cell phone again, it indicated that Jonathan was near the manor's entrance to the Batcave, and he didn't like that one bit.

* * *

AN: No idea if the bit about growth hormones is true. I heard it long ago in the manga _Planet Ladder._

Annoying, upsetting, and scary is the best way to describe OCD thought mantras that you can't break, along with distracting. I really hate it.

"The drop hollows the stone not by force but by the frequency of its fall." No idea who said that originally. It was a saying on a lot of T-shirts and things for my tae kwon do school, Tae Kwon Do Chung Do Kwan. Or Tae Kwon Do Blue Wave School, in English.


	24. Losing the Battle

AN: So all that's left on the Harley costume is to make her boots, which will probably be the most difficult bit of all. But I will try and have pictures up as soon as everything's through!

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

He'd left the room without waiting for the Bat's arrival that morning for a number of reasons. The first being hunger, oddly enough. Even before the starvation, Jonathan had never been the type to get hungry. He'd eat if food was put in front of him, but almost never to excess, and he didn't really feel hungry unless he went for a ridiculously long period without food, usually upwards of twelve hours. Why that was, he wasn't entirely sure. He'd been like this before the toxin exposure, so it wasn't a result of brain damage. It might be due to the not-quite-starvation his great-grandmother had put him through in childhood. He honestly couldn't remember. Any hunger pains he might have experienced in that time had mixed with all the other miseries, and was now indistinguishable.

But for whatever reason, he'd woken up hungry today. He expected it was stress.

The second reason was that he didn't _want _to interact with the Batman. Well, that wasn't entirely true. He didn't want to be around the Bat, per se, but he very much wanted to satisfy the need for contact, be it verbal or physical, and his captor, much to his dismay, was the only one capable of sating that need. It had taken everything Jonathan had to leave the room, hunger aside, instead of waiting around for the other man to show up.

Scarecrow had better fucking appreciate how much effort all of this was taking.

The third reason, which as he was more than a bit ashamed to admit, he'd only thought of when he was halfway to the kitchen, was that a room where food was prepared had to have knives, and other sharp-edged things.

Not that he was stupid enough to try threatening the Batman into freeing him at knifepoint. He'd seen the martial arts skills of other League of Shadows members in his time with Ra's Al Ghul, and he had no desire to tempt the Bat into using such force on him. Ninjutsu aside, the Bat was always over-prepared for anything and everything—it was infuriating how quickly he'd discovered an antidote to the toxin Jonathan had slaved over for _years_—and could probably stop a nuclear missile if threatened with one, so a knife would do him about as much good as a piece of overcooked asparagus.

But a knife could, if sharp enough, be used to cut through the ankle bracelet. And considering the extravagance of all the Batman's possessions, childhood memento aside, his kitchen knives were probably made of some sort of NASA steel capable of cutting into the surface layer of atomic particles. He didn't even have to try cutting through it now, just conceal a blade until the Bat was out of the house and the butler far enough away for Jonathan to slip out a window without being caught. His captors had almost certainly thought of this by now, and taken precautions, but it didn't hurt to hope.

_It doesn't help either, _he'd reflected, upon coming into the kitchen to find that the several of the cabinets were padlocked, and multiple times each. Well, it was only to be expected, and it hadn't stopped him from meticulously searching every open cabinet, hoping to find any misplaced blade. A paring knife. A butter knife, even. At this point, he'd settle for a pizza cutter or a potato peeler.

The fact that the mental image of himself peeling away the strap was absolutely ridiculous had not escaped his notice.

But nothing had been overlooked. The Batman—or perhaps his butler—had left no stone unturned. Jonathan was not only unable to locate any sort of bladed implement, but also noted the conspicuous lack of any forks or breakable dishes in the open drawers and cabinets. It made his blood boil and flush to his face. It was like having child locks, only hellish.

At the very least, he'd wanted to be through with breakfast before the Batman had the chance to darken the doorway.

Unfortunately, he'd spent too much time searching to have enough left to ensure that luxury. And as such was subjected to another round of the Batman questioning him like a mother hen. To say it was hell was to completely underestimate it. It had been bad enough when he was _actively _ignoring the Batman. At least then, the glares and pointed looks had allowed him to look at the Bat. But when he had to act as though he didn't register the other's presence, he had no idea if the other was even _there_, aside from the movements and breathing he could hear.

It took everything he had and more not to raise his head. And the Batman's supposed concern wasn't helping in the slightest. Jonathan was getting desperate enough that he almost believed it to be genuine.

_This isn't _fair. The Batman was the person he hated most in the world—at least, the _living _person that he most despised. Even over the Joker. He understood _why _he felt the need, but knowing why didn't make it any less painful. If it was anyone else, he could handle it, degrading as it was. But it wasn't anyone else. It was the Batman.

He found himself involuntarily reminded of the dreams he'd had last February, when he was out of his mind and the Batman had taken him back to Arkham, effectively saving him from death by starvation or self injury. While the doctors had pumped antipsychotics and sedatives into his system waiting for them to stitch his mind back together, he'd had dreams involving the Batman. Dreams where the Batman r_escued _him from whatever else had lurked in his subconscious, and to his everlasting shame, he'd viewed them as good dreams at the time. Scarecrow had retained the sense to be furious about it.

Jonathan imagined his other half was probably feeling similarly now, given that what Jonathan wanted more than anything at that moment was to look up and be acknowledged. He fought that urge, clenching his free hand as tight as he possibly could, tight enough that his barely-there fingernails left gouges in his palm, and only managed to distract himself by translating classical music lyrics into English in his head.

It occurred to him that most of the classical music he knew was religious in nature. Damn it.

Still, it was better than giving in and accepting the Batman's so-called concern, so he kept at it, unable to do anything else unless his captor mercifully decided he was through and left the room first. Once enough time had passed for the Bat to have disappeared from sight in the hallway, Jonathan dropped the latest piece of music running through his mind—_Le Tableau de l'Opération de la Taille_, one of the few he knew that wasn't Christian-themed—and left the room with a speed he hadn't known himself capable of, too afraid of running into the Batman again to slow down.

He was fully intent on returning to the guest room, and either hiding under the bed or taking another shower, whichever seemed as if it would make the world more bearable. And then he ran past the room housing the piano and stopped in his tracks.

Three notes on the piano opened the trap door, that much he knew from when the Bat had first brought them into the manor and shut it that way, as opposed to putting down the Joker to close it himself. Jonathan had no idea which three notes, but a full keyboard only had eighty-eight keys. More keys than letters and symbols on the laptop, but he only needed three.

And the Batcave was sure to have blades of all sorts.

The Batman and his own anguish forgotten, Jonathan stepped inside, crossing the room slowly, delayed by both fear and hope. He sat at the piano bench, and paused for a moment, waiting to be caught.

No one came.

Hardly daring to believe it, he let out the breath he'd been holding in and began lightly tapping on the keys. Three notes…and they had to be something that didn't go together, that wouldn't be accidentally played…all he had to do was play discordant sets until he hit the right one.

He wasn't sure how long he sat there before the Batman placed his hands over his.

* * *

"I take it I'll have to lock you out of this room?" Bruce asked, as Jonathan stiffened. Looking back, sneaking up on the man and grabbing onto him—well, gently touching, but he doubted the other would view it that way—hadn't been the best of ideas. He hadn't thought about it at the time, but now that he had a frozen scarecrow seated before him, it became blindingly obvious.

Just as it was blinding obvious that he ought to have kept this room locked off. It was easy to forget that he'd used the keys to shut the door in front of Jonathan, as he almost never used them for that purpose, but it wasn't a mistake he could afford. Not when he had a mad genius intent on escape as a houseguest. True, Jonathan hadn't been able to open the door. But given enough time, he could have, and he was nothing if not persistent.

Under his hand, Jonathan's fingers twitched, the keys plinking in response.

"Sorry." He lifted his hands, far more slowly than he'd put them down for fear of startling the man more. "I didn't mean to—"

To his shock, Jonathan's own hand moved in response, tilting up to graze his fingers over Bruce's palm. Then his fingers gave another jerk, much more violently, and he pulled his hand away, his thin frame beginning to shiver.

"Jonathan?"

Jonathan stood as violently as he pulled, nearly upending the bench in the process. The shaking had become more pronounced and he was still avoiding eye contact. It was very possible and rather likely that this was another breakdown, much as Bruce prayed that it wasn't. He blocked Jonathan's exit, placing his hands on the other's shoulders. "What's wrong?"

He pulled away with all the force he had and accomplished nothing.

"Jonathan." He couldn't make the man meet his eyes, but he kept him from turning away. "I want to help you. Please, tell me what's wrong."

Jonathan muttered something inaudible, his own hands raking over Bruce's as he tried to pull free. As he had no nails and very little strength, it had no effect. The color had gone from his face completely, and he looked seconds from either tears or fainting.

"What?"

"_Please._" So soft he could barely hear it. "Please _let go._"

"I can't." He did settle for loosening his grip, and maybe too much, but he refused to take his hands off completely. Not while Jonathan was in a state like this. Bruce remembered the nail gun incident far too well for that. "Tell me what's wrong."

"_No._" His voice broke on the word, his eyes glistening. "Get off." It was too weak to be a threat, or even an exclamation.

After seeing the Joker sob, Bruce had thought nothing could shock him anymore. Not that Jonathan Crane's panic attacks were in any way more disturbing than the Joker's had been, but it seemed the knowledge that something worse was out there didn't make moments like this any less unnerving. "I can't let go until I know why you're acting this way."

"Be_cause_." There was a sulking note to his voice that would have seemed petulant in other circumstances.

"Because of what?" Bruce asked, as gently as he could. God, how he hated dealing with emotional villains. Not that he lacked pity, or the desire to help, but helping by apprehending a criminal and helping by holding a crying maniac were two very, very separate things. And Bruce was about as skilled at the later as a mute was at public speaking.

"_You._ L-let go!" He was crying now, though silently, desperately trying to look anywhere besides back at Bruce.

Just when he'd thought things couldn't get any more confusing. "I don't understand."

"Let go!" He pulled away again, and this time with enough force to wrench one hand free. He immediately began swinging the free hand at Bruce, landing slap after ineffectual slap.

"Jonathan—"

"Stop!" His voice broke again, and from the sound of it and his expression, Bruce wasn't sure if he was still being addressed or if Jonathan had begun talking to himself. "Stop pretending that you care. I can't look at you, I can't accept your help, I _can't_. I _can't_."

He was crying in earnest if not outright sobbing by this point, and his free hand had stopped swinging, instead finding Bruce's and holding as tightly as he could.

* * *

AN: _Le Tableau de l'Opération de la Taille _is a French piece by Marin Marais, and one of my bizarre favorites. It does not have lyrics so much as narration, and the narration describes the operation for the removal of a bladder stone that was used at the time, before anesthetic. The music reflects the emotional mood and the agony of the operation and becomes nothing so much as painful, high, off-key scratching at the song's climax. It's on Youtube.


	25. Breakthrough

AN: It occurs to me that I forgot to recommend _which _video on Youtube you'll probably want to watch if you don't speak French and want to know what the narration of _Le Tableau de l'Opération de la Taille_ actually says. The video by periodinstrumentfaN provides the English translation. It's not my preferred video, as I don't think it's as painful sounding as the others, but it's still good.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The League of Shadows should have taught how to deal with emotional outbursts.

Bruce could call himself, without vanity, a master of ninjutsu, among other things. Much as the principles of the League disgusted him, sickened as he was by the values that formed the very core of the organization, they had taught him well. He knew how to defend himself from any attack, and every way to subdue an attacker, ranging from the painless to the deadly, though he refused to employ the latter. Beyond fighting and defense, he'd learned a thousand other little subtleties, from the theatricality used to distract and disorient opponents to surmising an adversary's next move based on miniscule clues in mannerism and weight displacement.

None of which were of any use here, with Jonathan having abruptly stopped all physical aggression, holding onto Bruce as though his life depended on it while demanding to be let go at the same time. This, he had no idea how to respond to.

If he was being held at gun point or knife point or the wrong end of a bladed fan, he'd have had a response. Hell, he'd be better equipped to face a nuclear weapon than he was to face this little issue. The most experience he had with anything remotely like this was when the Joker had been standing on his balcony, threatening to jump, and Bruce wasn't too proud to admit that that had turned out terribly. It was one thing when Jonathan had gone psychotic. There, Bruce knew that the torments the man was going through were only his mind's fabrication, and even then it had been hard. Now, he had no idea _what _was wrong with Jonathan, and it wasn't as if his captive was in any state to tell him. Any attempt to ask was met with either anger or tears.

Here, he was a complete novice.

Of course, emotional breakdowns probably didn't matter much to the League. Given that their intent was almost always to destroy an opponent rather than subdue, they would view it as an opening for attack and little more than that. Whatever their reasoning, this situation hadn't been covered by Ra's or any of the others, so he was flying blind.

"Let _go_." It must have been the thousandth time he said it, the words barely intelligible due to both the fact that he was speaking through clenched teeth and that emotion had completely overtaken his voice.

Bruce didn't bother to point out that he _had _let go, against his better judgment, and the only thing keeping them in contact was Jonathan's death grip on his hand. It seemed counterproductive. "It's all right," he offered, without thinking that anything about the situation was, and only in the hope that if he said it enough, maybe Jonathan would believe it.

"It's _not_." He wouldn't raise his head, and wiped at his eyes every few seconds, as if that would at all hide the fact that he was in hysterics.

"It is." Still at a loss for any way to help, he held Jonathan's hand back as opposed to just letting the man have it. Jonathan stiffened, but made no move to let go. "Please tell me what's wrong."

"_No._" Now he did pull away, but not with enough force to break Bruce's grip. "Stop asking."

"I can't stop asking," he said calmly, slowly, as if speaking to a child. "I want to help you and I can't do that if I don't know why you're upset."

Jonathan kicked him. It was surprisingly powerful—though the power of a blow didn't depend on strength so much as momentum—but not enough to make him let go. Especially considering that Jonathan had never fully released Bruce's hand, even while struggling for freedom.

He ignored the pain shooting through his leg and tightened his grip, though still not enough to be painful yet. "Jonathan."

He stopped struggling. Bruce wasn't sure if it was from exhaustion or the realization that he wasn't going to be able to free himself, but he was grateful either way. "You don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't _care._" He wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand, the other tightening on Bruce's. "You don't care what happens to me, and you don't want to help me."

"That's not true."

"Yes, it is. You're mistaking your guilt for concern." He glanced at Bruce for the slightest of seconds, managing an extremely analytical look despite the tears. "The only reason that you're even attempting to calm me down is because you feel responsible for my…condition."

No matter how many times the issue of Jonathan Crane's insanity was brought up, it still stung. There was no doubt that the man had been more than a bit unhinged before being given his toxin—that he honestly believed there was nothing wrong with torturing his patients was a sure sign of that—but poisoning him and then leaving him without the antidote had not been heroic. Justified, perhaps, in that Rachel's life was slipping and he was more than a bit preoccupied with alerting Lucius so they could mass-produce an antidote, but the fact remained that he was responsible for the brain damage, and the brain damage was responsible for a great deal of Jonathan's psychosis.

His guilt wasn't exactly alleviated by the knowledge that, given the chance, he'd do the same thing again.

"No, Jonathan. I'm trying to calm you down because I'm worried."

"So it's about making _yourself _feel better. How typical."

It was almost a talent, how he could be so infuriating even when he was a helpless nervous wreck. "You can turn this back around on me all day, if you want to. It doesn't change the fact that you need help, and that whatever's wrong isn't going to go away unless you talk to me and give me the chance to do something about it."

"There are some things in this world that you can't fix, Batman." Jonathan met his eyes again, his tearstained face contorted by contempt. "And I don't need _your _help."

Bruce mentally counted down from five as he told himself, forcefully, that losing his temper and yelling at the man would only make things worse. It didn't make it any less tempting. "I know that you don't like me. But I don't want you to suffer while you're here. You're not alone, and whatever you're going through, you don't have to—"

"_Don't _pretend to understand what I'm going through. Our fights haven't given you some special insight into my mind, and neither has any of this. You don't know a damn thing about me, so stop pretending." His words carried all the biting anger they always had, without a break or stammer to betray them. But he'd stopped looking Bruce in the eye again.

Which he took as a sign that he was on the right track.

"I _don't _know what you're going through," he admitted, gently and awkwardly placing his other hand on Jonathan's shoulder, keeping it there though the man tried to jerk away. "But I want to understand. You shouldn't have to be alone." And Jonathan was lonely, that much was obvious. Why he longed for the Joker so badly was something Bruce would never understand, but his behavior towards Bruce over the past few days had made it clear that he wanted attention, positive or negative.

"You don't know _anything _about me." He pulled away with nowhere to go and ended up dragged closer when Bruce held on tighter. He was using all the force he had to try and wrench himself free, body shaking from the effort, and still unable to break the other's grip. "I don't need _you._ Leave me alone."

"You need someone. You haven't been able to leave my side for days."

"I don't—"

"I know you don't like doing it. That doesn't make it any less true. Whatever's upsetting you is too much for you to handle alone. You need help."

"I _don't_." The shake was back in his voice, matching the tremors of his body. There were tears on his face again, and his hands twitched as if he wanted to wipe them away, but was prevented from doing so by Bruce's hold on him. "I ca—I don't."

"Why can't you? Why does the idea of letting someone else help you scare you so much?"

"B-because." It wasn't a real answer, not even close, but it was the best Jonathan could manage before he degenerated into incoherent tears and collapsed against Bruce in what would have been a hug, had he been able to move his arms that much.

* * *

If Scarecrow were here, he'd be disgusted. Possibly too disgusted to speak. Certainly disgusted with Jonathan even more than Jonathan was at himself right now, which shouldn't even be physically possible. Jonathan could imagine all the things he'd say, all the shouting and cursing and attacks he'd be attempting on the Batman the moment he took control from Jonathan.

But Scarecrow wasn't here. Not even hugging the goddamn Batman had been enough to bring him back.

And it was for that reason that Jonathan couldn't stop hugging. Never before had he felt so completely abandoned, never before had his desertion been thrown into such sharp relief. Being held made it worse, like rubbing salt into a wound, but it was the _only _comfort he had, painful as it was. The only contact, and the only thing reminding him that he wasn't completely alone.

Not that it made things any less horrible.

"Let go," he muttered, unable to make even the weakest of physical protests. "Please. Let me go."

"Is that what you want?"

There was no accusation to his voice. No tone that gave away what they both knew; that Jonathan wanted to be held even as it disgusted him, and his arguments otherwise were completely transparent, even with the half-truth they held. There was no humor to the Batman's voice either, indicating that his concern was genuine, and making the situation even more painful. Jonathan didn't know whether to cry or be sick.

"I'm not trying to patronize you," the Batman said softly, his voice never sounding further from that horrible rasp than it did now. "Honestly, I'm not. I don't want you to be miserable."

God, how Jonathan wished he had enough resolve to kick him again. Preferably right between the legs so he could watch and laugh as the Bat collapsed in agony. Yes, it was underhanded and low, and something no man should ever consider, but so what? This was the vigilante who'd torn his mind apart and was now pretending they could be civil with each other. It would be his own fault for lowering his guard. "You hate me."

"No, I don't." The Batman paused, eyes tracking around the room as he thought of something to say. "I…I can't say that I like you, but I don't hate you. And I don't want you to suffer, especially if I can prevent it."

"What does it matter, if it's me?" Jonathan tasted blood and realized he'd been biting his lips. So he was back to self-mutilation, however minor. Perfect. Just perfect.

"You—you're still a _person._ I don't want you to be unhappy. I just want the city to be safe."

He was lying. He had to be. The Batman did not care about the dark side of the city, beyond making sure they were locked up. His only "concern" here was probably keeping himself from the inconvenience of having a villain commit suicide or something in his nice, spotless manor. There was no way he was being honest.

And yet Jonathan's stability was weakening to the point where it seemed plausible, and that made him cry all the harder.

Batman stood there awkwardly, as he seemed to do about ninety percent of the time now. In his suit, the Batman was terrifying, a creature worthy of haunting Jonathan's nightmares as he so often did. But out of the body armor, he was more of a hapless idiot than anything else at least fifty percent of the time. He clearly knew he was in over his head, why couldn't he just go away?

If Jonathan could just make himself let go…

"Do you—can I get you any—"

"If you finish that sentence I will rip out your spine and bludgeon your skull with it." He wiped his eyes on his overlarge sleeve, sniffing. "Asking me if I need anything every twelve seconds doesn't help, Batman. It doesn't do anything besides _piss me off._"

There was a pause. The Batman looked suitably rebuked for a moment, but not angry. Jonathan wished he could just provoke the man into knocking him out. Maybe he could dream of Scarecrow again, or just be mercifully away from here for a few hours.

But the damn Bat wouldn't get angry no matter how hard Jonathan pushed.

"I'm sorry," he said, finally. "I just—I don't know what you want."

What he wanted? God, where would he even start, if he could say any of it out loud? Jonathan wanted out of here. He wanted to be outside, or in a library, or a hot shower, or even back with his friends at Arkham, anywhere but this godforsaken mansion. He wanted Nightmare back, or someone to talk to that hadn't ruined his life. Even the Joker. He wanted to make someone else cry for a change and sit back and laugh at the effects, research or not.

More than anything, more than he could say, he wanted Scarecrow back.

The Batman, of course, couldn't or wouldn't provide any of those things, and saying what he really wanted would get the antipsychotics doubled. So he went with the one thing in reason. "I—I want to sit down."

"Okay." There was relief in the man's voice as he led Jonathan to the couch, though whether it was relief at getting his captive off him or being able to provide something, Jonathan wasn't sure.

He refused to let go of the Batman's hand as he sat. It was the only anchor he had, like it or not. "I want…I want you to sit next to me."

For a moment there was a long and horrible period of quiet. Then the Batman shrugged, and sat down.

* * *

AN: And I'm off to the midnight showing of _Harry Potter_. Even though I have to work from eight to four tomorrow, because I'm smart like that. In costume, no less. As a random Hufflepuff, to represent my house. Yes, I'm a Hufflepuff. Laugh all you want. I'm proud. And random because for the last Potter movie, I spent over an hour painstakingly recreating Marietta Edgecombe's facial disfigurement with only lipstick, eye shadow, and blush, to be met with "You know she's not in the movie, right?" all night long. Yeah, so? Any time's a good time to look like a leper.


	26. Progress

AN: Okay, so Harry Potter rocked my socks, but of course my body had to punish me for it. Not in the form of fatigue, surprisingly enough, but by way of the worst stomach cramps I think I've ever had. My entire body was shaking. And while I was at work. Sometimes I hate being a woman. But yeah, the movie was great.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

It was quiet again, as it was any time they were in a room together and not at each other's throats. Jonathan had yet to relinquish his hold on Bruce and gave no indication that he planned on doing so soon. He wasn't meeting Bruce's eyes, instead staring down at his feet, barely visible on the cushion of the couch under his oversized pants. At least he wasn't looking as far from Bruce as he possibly could, or making a point in not looking.

Honestly, aside from the occasional sniffs and wipes across his face making it apparent that he was still crying, this was the most rational he'd been in days. It was bizarre to think that holding Bruce's hand and leaning up against him would be in any way logical for Jonathan Crane, but at least he wasn't ignoring the fact that something was very wrong anymore. He'd acknowledged that he needed the presence of another, his feelings about that need aside, and had stopped shoving away the person trying to help him. Bruce might have called it a step forward, if he wasn't as confused as Jonathan seemed to be about what it all meant.

The man was broken, that much was clear. Whether accepting help was a sign that the cracks were mending or that they were growing wider, Bruce had no idea. For all his ability to understand the Scarecrow as a criminal and what drove him on the streets, being taken out of costume and put into such an incongruent situation as this was like having a grappling gun torn from his hands.

There was a motive to his criminal activities. Beyond escape, Bruce was clueless as to what prompted these outbursts. There was no insight lurking in the sparse and vague psychiatrist's notes from his Arkham file, or any logical underlying pattern to the mood swings that Bruce could discern.

That was probably why he resorted to asking if Jonathan was all right every other second. He had no other idea of where to begin. Batman's job was to subdue criminals and take the innocents to safety, not counsel the victims or the instigators during the aftermath. Bruce Wayne had all the tact with others as a charming but utterly wasted frat boy. And between the two personas, he'd interacted honestly with so few people for so long that he had no idea how he even related to others. He barely remembered how his childhood psychiatrists had approached the death of his parents, only how hard and how infuriating and upsetting it was to talk about it. It had been hard enough when trained professionals had known what the problem was.

Here, he was functioning as an armchair psychologist for a man who wouldn't even speak civilly to him. Here, he'd doubted getting through was even possible.

Jonathan had proven him wrong by allowing—asking, even—Bruce to sit next to him. Bruce had decided to consider that progress despite his misgivings about the whole thing, simply because they seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel and it didn't seem possible to go any lower. So they were moving forward.

He wished he could be more optimistic about that.

But there was always that nagging voice in his head, from that space that varied from rigidly moralistic to bloodthirsty depending on the intensity of his emotions, the voice that he considered the Batman of his mind. A conscience of sorts, the sort of conscience that nagged at him for sleeping or eating when there was patrolling or at least training to be done. Maybe more of an obsession than a conscience. Whatever it was, it was cautious to the point of paranoia, and now it was reminding him that those who fight—or counsel—monsters must take care not to become monsters themselves.

Ironic, considering that aside from his ex-girlfriends, everyone would consider Batman a greater monster than Bruce.

Not that he was without point. Bruce wasn't just uncomfortable with the situation because he was bad at dealing with unrestrained emotion. There was the rather unforgettable fact that Jonathan Crane had poisoned him on multiple occasions, among other injuries, and would cheerfully kill him without a second thought.

That, and he had far more in common with Jonathan than he'd ever admit.

It wasn't as if the Scarecrow was the only one using fear as a weapon. Or who'd had assistance from the League of Shadows to make him what he was today. They hoped to achieve two very separate things, yes, and their methods of causing fear were markedly different, but the end goal was the same: control and order.

Not only that, but they'd both been victims of manipulation by the same forces; the aforementioned League of Shadows, and the Joker. Bruce had never been as twisted to the Joker's will—thank God—but he did have some idea of how Jonathan must have been tricked into thinking that the Joker truly cared for him. He still had no idea how much of the Joker's behavior had been a lie when he threatened to jump off the balcony, and how much had been true. The fact that he'd been duped into letting his guard down at all was revolting enough.

And incredibly unsettling when he realized it brought him a step forward to someone he so…well, not despised. His hate for Jonathan Crane had dissipated almost as soon as the man had stopped being a threat, and he and Rachel had stopped having nightmares regarding the toxin's effects, for the most part. Not that he enjoyed his company, not in the least, but it was hard to think of old grudges while Jonathan was still sniffling on him.

Still feeling completely useless, he considered his options and settled for placing his free hand on Jonathan's shoulder. His captive stiffened, but didn't push him away.

* * *

He'd given up fighting things.

What was the point? They both knew he could be subdued if he tried to get away, and what's more, they both knew that the Batman didn't have to use force. He had thing Jonathan needed most, and without it, he'd go right back to being a sobbing nervous wreck. Having ties to another human were as valuable to him as food or oxygen at the moment, and until he found a way around that, he was stuck here.

It ought to have pissed him off. He should be seeing red now, scheming all the beautiful, horrible ways he was going to repay the Bat for this humiliation. Scarecrow had always been the one to come up with the best tortures, but it wasn't as if Jonathan was a novice to the art of fear. Just because he didn't give as much thought to inflicting pain, it didn't mean he couldn't.

At the very least he ought to feel humiliated. Relying on his most hated enemy for comfort, letting _the Batman _lay hands on him. Shameful didn't come close to covering it.

But more than anything, he felt numb to it all.

He wasn't sure why. He expected it was from putting so much effort into the situation. There was only so long he could be hurt and outraged before the fire had burned through all the fuel. He simply didn't have the energy to deal with it any longer, especially with the exhaustion his latest outburst had caused.

He didn't even have the energy to get angry about the fact that he wasn't angry. He expected that as soon as he'd gotten a decent amount of sleep, or even a long period of sitting quietly, he'd be back to furious, but he couldn't bring himself to care.

Bizarre, how reaching his breaking point seemed to have awoken some inner calm and resolve he hadn't even known he had. Scarecrow had always been the one to stitch him back together once he'd hit rock bottom. He supposed it was either compensate or perish, and he'd subconsciously chosen the former.

Not that he'd replaced his other half. The sense of emptiness, of missing something, was still there and strong as ever. But obviously, crying about it had done nothing to help the situation, so there was no use in having another fit. Losing Scarecrow had broken him enough as it was; the last thing he needed to do was exacerbate it.

And this _was _comforting, much as he wished to the contrary. His body didn't know the difference between a friend's touch or an enemy's, as long as it was gentle, and his mind couldn't seem to put forth the effort to be bothered. He knew on some level that this went against everything he stood for, and gave a half-hearted pull away from the Batman, knowing full well it wasn't enough to break the other's grip and not really caring.

The Batman's hold on him loosened, not that it had ever been all that tight. "Jonathan?"

He sounded as if he might let go out of concern. _Oh, hell. _Principles be damned, and dignity as well. He tightened his grip on the Batman's hand again, and while his face wasn't burning as it would have before, he could feel the flush there.

"Do you want to get up?"

"If I wanted to get up, I would have stood, wouldn't I?"

He made the mistake of raising his head as he spoke, and saw something akin to hurt flash briefly through the Bat's eyes. It made something akin to guilt flash through his stomach, for reasons he couldn't and didn't want to comprehend. _You know your life sucks when you feel bad for offending the Batman._

"Is there anything y—" He caught himself before he could finish. Good, because Jonathan didn't feel at all up to ripping out anyone's spine, even if it was the Batman's. "Tell me if you need something, all right?"

He was too apathetic to come up with anything suitably rude to say back, or to say anything at all. Instead, he leaned back against the couch, letting his eyes close, and allowing the hand holding the Bat's to fall to his lap.

"Do you need to lie down?"

"No." He said it adamantly, for once. There was no denying that he was tired. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been this tired, barring sedation. Losing face and exposing your weakness to your enemy after your closest friend had deserted you tended to do that. At that moment, there was almost nothing he wanted more than sleep.

However, "almost" was the operative word in that statement. Obviously, his need for Scarecrow overcame his need for rest, but so did his need to maintain contact. Lying down could mean lying down on the couch they were on. It could also refer to a bed. Which would almost certainly be the one in the guest bedroom. Where the Batman would leave him to sleep.

He couldn't be left alone. Not now.

"All right."

He could hear the dubious tone to the Batman's voice, even as his eyes fluttered shut once more. The Bat would probably leave once he was sleeping, but he couldn't bring himself to care, as long as he was there until Jonathan slept. He ought to be disgusted with himself, and he knew that, but it was too hard. Everything seemed to have weakened, from his anger and sorrow to the wall in his mind to his refusal to accept help.

He felt himself shift forward as his fatigue increased, found himself leaning against the Batman. He'd never thought, when facing the man in his armor, about the person underneath and the heat that his body would have. But it did, just like anyone else—though the Bat was nothing like anyone else—and it was comfortable and, in the strangest of ways, secure enough that he didn't mind whom he was leaning up against. He couldn't bring himself to wake up enough to move, or even to be angry about the position he found himself in.

Scarecrow, however, could bring himself to be angry. Furious, as Jonathan found when he took control and bolted upright, giving the Batman the contemptuous glare his other half hadn't had the drive to provide. "You get your hands off of me. Now."


	27. Waking Self

AN: Happy anniversary TDK! Or birthday, I'm really not sure what it is. Whatever. A year ago today, I remember standing in the lobby waiting to get into the midnight showing of _The Dark Knight_, clad in my green bathing suit and tights with fake ivy entangled through my hair. Yes, I knew Ivy wasn't in the movie. But it was still awesome. I may go to the next film—if there is a next film—in my Harley costume, thought if I do, I may have to go as Harley in the red negligee or Harley in that five seconds of _Mad Love _where she walks around without the hood but with the makeup, mask, and suit. Because I've found that putting that thing on my head while my whole body is covered raises the temperature about twelve thousand degrees.

Anyway, many happy returns of the day!

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"What?"

The Batman's tone sounded just as clueless as the blank expression on his face looked. Not that that was anything new; the man always looked like a complete idiot, one hundred percent of the time. Always. When he had the mask on, he managed to twist that moronic expression into a truly frightening scowl—and how he managed that, Scarecrow had no idea—but without the Kevlar or graphite or whatever it was the cowl was made of, he looked every bit the empty-headed playboy he played all too well at being.

God, how Scarecrow hated him.

"Let go. Right now." He'd pulled his hand free of the Batman's hold the instant he'd sat up, but there was still the issue of the other hand on his shoulder, which had yet to move no matter how much hard Scarecrow smacked his arm. If anything, his grip had tightened.

Bastard.

"You…" He caught Scarecrow's arm, holding it in place. "You just said that you wanted to be held."

_Well, thank you, you…stating-the-overly-apparent idiot. _"And now I'm saying that I _don't_. Get off."

For a moment he just sat there. Scarecrow was about to start kicking and shouting when he finally let go, and he took that opportunity to shuffle as far back onto the couch as he could, hands somewhat raised to defend if the Bat tried anything else. "What's wrong?"

_Jesus Christ._ "What's wrong?" he repeated, voice absolutely dripping with disgust. "What's. _Wrong_? You mean beyond the fact that I'm a prisoner, you've got me tagged like an animal, and that I'm in close proximity with you? Oh, nothing, Batman. Nothing at all."

_Scarecrow!_

From the space in their mind that Jonathan occupied, the shocked silence had finally broken. With his other half's exclamation came the flood of his emotions, shock and anger and caution and a thousand other things, but above all, overwhelming joy. Just feeling it made Scarecrow's anger all but dissipate. There weren't words to describe how much he'd missed the link between them, missed everything from Jonathan's happiness to his outrage to the ridiculous panic attacks he'd have over stupid, insignificant things that no one else would ever care about. Things that seemed so irritating or so trivial at the time, that he never realized how much he'd treasured until he cut himself off from them. He'd never realized just how much Jonathan meant to him, either.

_Jonathan._

He could feel his alter ego _melt_ at the response, the revelation that Scarecrow was acknowledging him again. He let Jonathan's euphoria wash over himself, losing all notice or concern of the outside world in the process. None of that mattered now. Even the fact that the Batman had laid hands on _his _Jonathan fell second in priority to the glory that was being reunited. _Jonathan._

He didn't need to say how much he'd missed him. Jonathan knew. He could feel Scarecrow's emotions every bit as strongly as Scarecrow could feel his, and anyway, there weren't words for the grief and longing they'd gone through. He hadn't been able to feel Jonathan's emotions when he'd cut himself off, but he'd watched the situation as an outside observer, and witnessing the madness, desperation, and sorrow his other half had gone through had torn him apart. Feeling all of that on top of the visual, as he was now, caused grief to the point of actual pain.

But mercifully, it was buried under the happiness.

_I…you…never. _Jonathan's thoughts shifted gears from the maelstrom of feeling to a single and coherent line of thought. _Never leave me again._

_No, _Scarecrow agreed, the ache of the loss still burning inside him. _Not ever._

And then the conversation was over, abruptly as it had begun, both lost in relishing the connection, in delighting in the other's presence. Scarecrow nearly melted himself as he felt Jonathan embrace him. Physically, they only had one body, but they could create the sensation of contact, something Scarecrow had never fully understood or cared enough to explore. Jonathan knew when Scarecrow was shrugging or rolling his eyes, for example, even if their body wasn't actually doing those things, and Scarecrow could feel Jonathan pacing around or biting his nails when he was the one in control. He'd never realized how much he missed those sensations either.

Jonathan was embracing him so tightly now that it could only be referred to as mind-snuggling. Well, there was probably some other name for it, one far more dignified, but Scarecrow couldn't bring himself to care. Whatever it was, it was joyous.

So of course the Batman had to ruin it by laying hands on him again. As if they'd not just discussed this, the bastard was back to putting his hands on Jonathan's arms and shaking him—gently at least, not that it mattered—back and forth.

_Damn him. _With more effort than he remembered ever using before, he pulled himself back to the outside world. Jonathan didn't like that, of course, and it took a hell of a lot of _It's okay, I'll be back, I promise, love you too _before he could free himself. Oh, he was going to kill the Batman for this.

It took him longer than it should have to pull away, smacking the Batman's hands off. Well, when the mind told him that he was being bear-hugged, he supposed his body expected not to move. Whatever. Technicalities of his interactions with Jonathan aside, the Bat wasn't touching him anymore, and that was the important thing. "Tell me, Batman, what did I just say?"

"What happened?" God, he looked stupider than ever when he was doing that mock-concern thing. At least, that's what Scarecrow assumed it was. His expressions were all so equally bland and moronic that it was impossible to be sure.

"If you can't remember what we were talking about less than five minutes ago, I suggest you see a doctor instead of bothering me about it." He paused, eyes drifting in a parody of consideration. "I'd recommend…no, there's no one at Arkham I'd recommend."

"Jonathan." There was an edge of steel to his voice, and a look in his eyes that Scarecrow didn't usually see until there was a mask and eyeblack around them. "I'm serious."

"So am I. I don't know how any of those empty-headed glory hounds got doctorates to begin with." He knew, on an intellectual level that was not quite intellectual enough to be Jonathan's, that provoking the Bat was a terrible idea. Yet he couldn't bring himself to care. Maybe if he got hit the Batman would be disgusted at himself for violating his principles and start keeping his hands to himself.

"Jonathan." There was a controlled calm to his voice. So no such luck, then. "You need to tell me wha—"

"I don't "need to" anything," he snapped, standing before the man could try to stop him. "I don't care that I'm your prisoner; that does _not _give you the right to know what's going on inside my head at every moment. And I don't understand your fascination with it anyway. If you want someone for you to follow around and interrogate and paw at, why don't you go find the Joker?"

To his credit, the Batman handled this sudden change of personality fairly well. He was unable to keep his mouth from going agape at the outburst, though.

"Unless you don't want a _willing _plaything," Scarecrow added, both for spite and to make sure that the Bat would be too stunned to follow when he turned and stormed out of the room.

* * *

_What the _hell _was that?_

Bruce was fairly sure he felt a migraine coming on. His duty-driven side told him that he ought to be following Jonathan, making sure that whatever had just sparked in his head to make him behave that way wasn't making him a danger to himself or anything else in the mansion. However, that side was suffering a rare loss to the Bruce Wayne half, who had decided that staying far, far away would be the best option, both for his sanity and his blood pressure.

The part of his mind that wasn't wrapped up in that power struggle was busy trying to work out how Jonathan had gone from yet another breakout attempt, to sobbing, to snuggling him on the couch, to pulling away and zoning out, and, most confusingly of all, to accusing Bruce of trying to molest him. If that was what he'd been implying. Bruce was too confused by the whole mess to be sure.

_He's a mental patient, _his Bat side reminded him, giving up the debate for a moment. _It's to be expected._

There was the insanity issue, now that he thought about it. There had been mentions of mood swings in his file, though Bruce had never seen a note of anything that extreme. _Everything _about Jonathan had changed when he'd sat up, from his posture to the look in his eyes. The look _of _his eyes, even. It was completely alien to anything Bruce had seen since Jonathan had regained lucidity, and probably before that. He knew that most mental illness came with bizarre mood disturbances, but he'd never witnessed such a striking difference.

He had no idea what he'd just seen, even with time to reflect on that. Morbid curiosity aside, he wasn't sure he _wanted_ to know.

Well, there was no point in following him when he was clearly furious. Close proximity seemed to be what had caused the outburst to begin with. Bruce supposed Jonathan had calmed down enough to realize just who he was hugging onto, and panicked. He wouldn't have thought that panic would be enough to change the man's demeanor completely, but clearly he was wrong.

Considering their past encounters, it did make all too much sense.

Shaking his head, Bruce stood, began running through a list of possible excuses to make for why he'd be late to work, and walked out.

* * *

_That bastard._ Scarecrow sat on the guest bed, managed to stay there for about five seconds before he was up again, stalking around the room. _Who does he think he is, acting as if I have any obligation to him after all he's done? Of course the Batman would be some disgustingly rich pervert with an entitlement complex. I don't know how we didn't see that before._

He paused, glanced over his shoulder at where Jonathan would be, if they were separate. _I don't hear you concurring._

_He's a mindless idiot who's not worth the time of day, _Jonathan said, in the same bright tone he'd been using since the snuggling started. He didn't seem capable of much else right now.

_And yet he's defeated us on multiple occasions. _Scarecrow shook his head at the thought. His fists clenched, fingers digging into his palms. The skin around what was left of his nails burned. Jonathan had all but bitten them off completely. _That son of a bitch. I'm going to take that stethoscope he's so fond of and shove it down his throat—_

_You knew about the stethoscope?_ Jonathan's embrace weakened, something other than joy slipping into his voice for the first time. _You saw that?_

Wonderful. Goddamn the Batman for making him angry enough to bring that up. Scarecrow really was going to kill him, somehow. _Yes, Jonathan. _He reached up, and stroked his hair out of his face, the closest he could come to a physical caress. He couldn't lie, now that he'd let that slip, no matter how much it would help things. _I saw the stethoscope._

_How…how much did you see?_

The sensation of embrace disappeared completely. He felt oddly cold without it, despite the fact that it had never actually happened. Suggestion was a powerful thing. _Everything._

Silence, from the other end.

_Jonathan?_

This time their body did go cold. It wasn't just a trick of the imagination; it was enough to make him shudder. To match it, his emotions switched from joyous to desolate, so rapidly that Scarecrow was left stunned. This didn't bode well. _Jonathan?_

_You knew. You knew what I was going through…you knew the whole time…and you still didn't help me._

_Jonathan, you knew that I was watchi—_

_How _could _you?_ The fact that he wasn't speaking aloud didn't stop his voice from breaking. There was anger seeping into the words now, and that hurt more than anything else. Jonathan did not get angry with him. Irritated, yes. But actual anger? He never felt that, not even when Scarecrow had left. It wasn't right. _You—you ev—how could you just sit back and watch?_

_How could you put your faith in the Joker over me?_ He knew he sounded defensive, and that the same anger coloring Jonathan's words were seeping into his own. And yet he couldn't bring himself to care enough to stop. _With all that he's done to you. You still trusted him more, _knowing _that he'd use you for his own gain and drop you immediately afterward. Do you have any idea how much that hurt?_

_I'd imagine it hurts about as much as having your best friend abandon you._ There was a bitterness to his voice that Scarecrow hadn't heard in a long time, the sort that lingered whenever he spoke or thought of his grandmother. To hear it turned on him was both outraging and devastating. _Best. Friend. You know, the sort of person who stays by your side even if he disagrees with your choices? Instead of running off and watching you suffer from afar._

_Even best friends realize the point where their beloved is being so colossally _stupid _that the only way to snap them out of it is to let them burn themselves. Not so eager to follow the clown's ideas now, are you? And if you want to talk about suffering, why don't I tell you how it feels to have your best friend ignore your concern for their wellbeing, right in front of you? Do you think I enjoyed that? Or that I _liked _cutting myself off from the only person in the world that I care about? It wasn't all sunshine and roses on my end either._

_You never got so desperate that you slashed your skin open with glass shards._

_No, I didn't. _He knew before he let the next words out that he was crossing a line, but he was powerless to stop himself. It helped that he didn't want to stop, either. _And I never got desperate enough to turn to the _Batman _for comfort, either._

Another moment of shocked silence.

_I—I didn't want—how _dare _you? _The words were painfully loud. _That was _your _fault, if you want someone to blame. _That's _how broken you left me. I didn't _want _his help. That hurt more than anything, and it's _your _fault, you hateful, manipulative—_

_Jonathan. _Scarecrow bit his lip, eyes closed more tightly than he'd have thought possible as he tried to control himself. _I'm sorry. I am, honestly. I never should have let things get that far. _Well, actually, if he'd convinced Jonathan never to question him again, it was worth it, but he doubted the truth would win him any points here. _I should have realized that things weren't going to get stable without me, and I should have put my anger aside to help you. But think about it for a minute: _You _are the waking self._

He felt some of the anger fade, replaced by confusion. _What?_

_You're the one that everyone else sees. Nine times out of ten, you're the one who opens his eyes when we wake up. And the other one time, we're usually drugged. We share it, but by default, the body would be yours._

_But we share it. We always have._

_I know. _Thank God he believed that. It made life so easier than it could be. _But that doesn't change the fact that you're the one who interacts most with the world. I've got you. _Only _you. And when you overlook me, I have nothing. _He brushed a hand over his face, another caress that he could have made mentally but preferred that Jonathan really feel. It was a risk to say these things, but it was the only way he could think of to bring his other half around. _I'm nothing without you, Jonathan._

The embrace was back. The joy was still gone, but euphoria was more than a bit much to hope for at the moment. _I'm sorry._

_I'm sorry too. What I did was wrong._

_We were both wrong. Just...I won't do it anymore. Scarecrow?_

_Yes, Jonathan?_

Even mentally, his voice shook. _Promise never to leave me again._

He already had, though he consented to say it again. _I promise._

But in the part of his mind that he could hide from Jonathan, he thought about what the future could hold and wondered.


	28. The Awful Truth

AN: Apologies for the delay in chapter updates; my body still hates me and I've been all fatigued. I'm working from eight in the morning to ten at night tomorrow, but I will try and have a chapter out by Thursday.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan fell asleep in Scarecrow's arms. Or the imagined equivalent, anyway. For the first time in ages, his dreams weren't filled with imagery bizarre enough to make Dali's paintings look realistic. When he opened his eyes, blinking at the sunlight filtering through the barred windows, he found that he couldn't remember what he'd dreamt at all.

It wasn't as if he remembered his dreams for long after waking in the first place, unless they were particularly vivid or disturbing. And he'd never been one to believe that dreams held the secret to the subconscious; certainly parts of them were significant, and glimpses into what lurked beneath the surface, but they weren't the key to a person's psyche. He was, however, willing to admit that his surreal half-nightmares as of late were almost certainly influenced by his fractured state of mind. Odd that they should stop—or at least stop being so jarring as to be committed to memory—so abruptly.

Then he felt Scarecrow's embrace again and realized exactly why they'd stopped.

_Did you forget I was here?_ Jonathan tensed at the question until his mind regained enough consciousness to realize that it had been asked in amusement, not offense.

_In a way._ He tightened his hold on Scarecrow and continued. _I guess I—well, not adjusted—but learned to tolerate the fact that I'd be waking up alone. But this is the first time in far too long that I haven't felt completely miserable after opening my eyes._

Life hadn't been much of a cakewalk while unconscious either; he still couldn't remove the images of Harley and the Joker, both horribly mutilated, from his mind, long after forgetting the actual context those sights were a part of. He didn't bother to explain those, thought, because Scarecrow wouldn't understand it, being incapable of dreaming.

They said it was impossible to sleep without dreaming, even if one didn't remember the dreams upon waking. They'd never met Scarecrow. He slept, in a way, but it was less of a sleep than shutting off, like a light switch going off, only returning when Jonathan woke, or on the rare occasions where Scarecrow flickered back to awareness before his other half. He didn't seem to need as much sleep as Jonathan, either, and never tired unless sedated. The concept of dreaming was entirely foreign to him, apart from Jonathan's explanations of the phenomenon, and he'd never experienced one of Jonathan's night terrors either. Lucky.

Precisely why that was, Jonathan had never bothered to question. The body obviously slept with Jonathan, so there wasn't anything supernatural or psychic going on _a la _Sadako Yamamura. Or was that only Samara Morgan? It'd been too long since he'd watched the films to be sure. Whatever. The theory he had come up with, in the rare times he'd mused on it, was that Scarecrow's odd pseudo-sleep was a defense mechanism of sorts. Something like a catnap, so they could quickly waken if danger was afoot.

The fact that Scarecrow rarely woke before him somewhat killed the theory, but then, it was never something he'd taken as absolute truth.

The memory of the dream with Scarecrow in it struck him suddenly and forcefully, like a batarang to the head. How had _that _come about, if Scarecrow couldn't dream and had closed the space between them? It couldn't have been nothing more than a dream, because he'd never dreamt of Scarecrow as a physical entity before that time—not that he could recall—and if he dreamt something as wonderful as Scarecrow's return, he doubted his own subconscious would be so cruel as to have Scarecrow tell him that the reappearance was temporary.

_I'm not sure how that happened._

Jonathan started at the Scarecrow's voice. Disgusting, how a few weeks alone had put him this on edge. He should not have begun tolerating life without his other half, not even in the slightest bit. It was an insult to Scarecrow and all that he'd done for Jonathan through the years. Jonathan could feel Scarecrow's emotions now just as Scarecrow could sense his, so he knew his other half wasn't upset, but he couldn't quite grasp how he was all right with it. "Saint like" and "Scarecrow" were not words he'd ever linked before. _You don't know how you got into my dream?_

_No. I was in my mind and then I was just—there. I don't know how to describe it. It's never happened before._

Jonathan chalked it up to his overwhelming need for Scarecrow and Scarecrow's own need for him. Their connection was strong enough to contradict everything about how their mind had worked prior to the force separation. He couldn't think of a better way to define devotion than that. _How did it feel?_

_Wrong. _The reply was immediate. _Unsettling, like I'd gotten somewhere I shouldn't be, and I actually cared about the consequences. Just…uncomfortable._

_And you stayed with me, even with that feeling?_

_Of course I stayed with you. _His embrace tightened, as Jonathan's had not long before. _You needed me._

He'd comforted Jonathan despite being thrown into an unfamiliar and disconcerting scenario. Jonathan found himself touched beyond words, both at the compassion and selflessness of his other half. _Thank you._

_Jonathan?_

_Yes?_ The way the question was asked made him nervous. Scarecrow's voice had an uncharacteristic edge of unease to it, and Jonathan found himself wondering what could have happened to threaten their current happiness, or what he could have done wrong.

_You understand why I left, don't you?_

He did, much as he hated to think back on it. Ignoring Scarecrow had been wrong, and the separation had driven that point as deeply as it could. It had worked, godawful as it had been, and in spite—or because of—his hatred for it. He couldn't bring himself to say yes, so he settled for a nod.

_I didn't want to. I didn't have a choice._

_I know. _It hurt, but it wasn't something he was going to complain about. He wasn't going to risk losing everything again, especially not when he'd just gotten it back.

They stopped talking for a while, hearts far out on their sleeves thanks to the mental link, clear enough to make verbal communication obsolete. It wasn't as if there were words in the English language to cover all that they were feeling in the first place.

How long it lasted, Jonathan wasn't sure. The sunlight through the window drifted downward bit by bit, and when it seemed almost time for the sunset to begin, Jonathan stood, walking to the door.

Only a step toward the door, actually, before Scarecrow took hold and stopped them. _Where are you going?_

_I haven't eaten since this morning. I'm going to collapse if I go much longer without food._

Scarecrow, who ate much more than Jonathan did whenever he took control, relented to the logic and let him keep moving, albeit muttering the whole way. _I don't like this._

_He's not going to deny me food or poison me. It goes against his rules._

_I don't like being around him at all. He poisoned you, and made us lose everything we had, got us imprisoned in Arkham, put you in a bathtub—_

Jonathan cringed at the last one, the memory alone enough to make him go cold. _He's almost certainly not in the kitchen to begin with. It's starting to get dark. Obsessed as he is, he's probably pacing around in that cave of his in full costume, waiting for the night to fall proper. _Besides, if his eating patterns were anything similar to his sleeping patterns, the only meal he had was breakfast, and only occasionally.

He'd failed to take into account the Batman's drinking habits, however, and walked into the kitchen to happen across the Bat having a cup of coffee. _Oh hell._ Damn him and his caffeination. What good was one cup meant to do against severe sleep deprivation in the first place? He'd be better off hooking himself up to an IV of the stuff. The damage such a large amount would do to his body couldn't be worse than the damage he was doing by not sleeping.

_How many cups of coffee does it take to kill a person, Jonathan? _Scarecrow asked, abruptly halting the fit of obscenities he'd started upon seeing the Batman.

_Twenty-five an hour for four hours._ He doubted even the Bat would be that foolish, though. Scarecrow resumed cursing, almost to the point of speaking in tongues, as Jonathan devoted his energy to slinking back into the hall as quietly and quickly as possible. The Batman wasn't facing him, exactly, and didn't seem to have noticed him, so maybe if he just left and came back later—

"Can you have caffeine?"

The randomness of the comment stopped him in his tracks, even silencing Scarecrow. "I—what?"

"Caffeine." He raised the coffee, glancing to the doorway. "I didn't think offering this to you was a good idea if it could cause a bad reaction with your medication."

_What a brilliant observation. Dumbass._

Jonathan was inclined to agree with Scarecrow, though he kept himself from snapping. "I can have caffeine."

"Do you want any?"

"No."

"Okay." He turned his attention back to his own mug, seemingly uninteresting in further pursuing the conversation. Considering his compulsive need to pry into his captive's wellbeing every three seconds or so, Jonathan didn't believe it for a minute.

Not that suspicion stopped him from walking to the refrigerator, though in a cautious, somewhat stilted manner.

_What are you doing?_

_Eating._

_Can't it wait until he's gone?_

_You tell me, _Jonathan responded, though not rudely. Scarecrow could feel their pangs of hunger every bit as vividly as he could.

Scarecrow, however, lacked even the marginal skill Jonathan had managed in giving the Batman the silent treatment. "Shouldn't you be out protecting the city from people like yourself right now?"

There was an extremely faint scoff from the Bat. "It's still light out."

_So he'll only terrorize people with the dark to protect him. Lovely._

Jonathan, who'd felt enough rage over the past week or so that he'd honestly burned through it, at least for the time being, was content to let Scarecrow do the raging as he sat as far from the Batman as he possibly could.

_Why are we still in here?_

_Because I'm afraid his butler will disembowel me if I carry food across this immaculate manor, _Jonathan responded honestly, unable to stop the flush to his face that came with the confession.

_I don't like this at all._

_I know. What choice do we have?_

_We have the choice of not sitting here civilly conversing with the goddamn Batman, for starters._

_If you want to fight him, you can. I'm too tired to try anymore. You might want some calories to burn first._

_Whose side are you on, Jonathan?_

He wasn't serious. Jonathan knew it. That didn't make the question sting any less. His complacency did disturb him, every bit as much as it hurt Scarecrow to witness. But struggling against it always seemed to lead to pain or tears. He'd just gotten his best friend back; he didn't want to ruin the moment by fighting his way into a breakdown. God knew he was disgusted with himself enough for all these breakdowns; desertion or not, he ought to be above sobbing in front of his worst enemy. He was supposed to be made of stronger stuff than that. Scarecrow certainly was.

To make matters infinitely worse, not all of the complacency was a matter of convenience, a step down the path of least resistance. There had been comfort in being held by the Bat, though he'd rather cut his tongue out than admit it. Yes, it was only because Scarecrow was gone, but the fact of the matter—which he'd never reveal to anyone, not even his other half—had been that toward the end of things, the Batman hadn't been a poor substitute. He lacked the mental connection, yes, but as far as fulfilling the physical need for contact…goddamn it, he'd done it perfectly.

His imagined memories of being held while psychotic didn't help in the slightest, nor did the fact that he almost believed the Bat when the man said that they _weren't _imagined—_Scarecrow. _

Scarecrow had seen everything, he'd said. And Scarecrow didn't suffer psychosis as an effect of the toxin, only Jonathan. He'd been the thing that kept them from falling apart completely last February, and he remembered the events of that time with perfect clarity, as opposed to Jonathan's jumbled recollections, indistinguishable for him from his usual nightmares.

_Scarecrow._

His other half halted mid-Batman death threat. _Yes?_

_I…_ He swallowed. This was going to hurt Scarecrow to ask, he knew that. It was horrible of him, but he couldn't stop the morbid curiosity building within. _You saw everything._

_Yes?_

_Including when I was mad?_

_Jonathan, you know why I couldn't intervene—_

_Yes, I know. That's not what I wanted to ask. It's…when I was—that is, when I didn't know what was going on, was there a point when…when I…_

_Jonathan, I can't answer you if I don't know what you're saying. What's wrong?_

He swallowed again, painfully. _Did I let the Batman hold me?_

There was a pause so long the discomfort was almost tangible.

…_Scarecrow?_

_Yes. _His voice was flat, devoid of both anger and mirth.

_God. _So the memories hadn't been fake. He felt…dirty. Like he'd allowed himself to be defiled, and enjoyed it. And he had. _God. I'm sorry, I didn't mean—_

_It's nothing _you_ did, Jonathan. _There was anger in his tone now, and conviction. _You didn't do anything wrong. It's _him, _understand? Only him._

_I—_

"Jonathan?"

Both of them jumped at that, Jonathan all but giving himself whiplash as he jerked his head to face the Bat. "What?"

"Do you remember the address of your last apartment?"

* * *

AN: Salvador Dali was a surrealist painter. His most famous painting is _The Persistence of Memory, _known to many as "the painting with the melting clocks." My favorite work of his would be _The Burning Giraffe. _Cillian Murphy is actually acting in a film about Salvador Dali, called _Dali and I, _in which Dali is going to be played by Al Pacino. This is all assuming that the film hasn't slipped into Development Hell, as I haven't heard many details about it for quite some time.

Sadako Yamamura is the ghost girl in _Ringu, _and Samara Morgan is her American counterpart in _The Ring. _I'm fairly sure that Sadako could sleep, though I'm not certain and Google is failing me, whereas Samara could not. That scene in the film of her in the hospital room, with days and days passing and her just sitting on the bed or watching the clock still unnerves me more than almost anything else in the movie. Though Sadako and her terrifying way of moving her eyes is every bit as scarring and then some, in a different way.


	29. Discontent

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Scarecrow was confused into silence for once, leaving Jonathan to stammer out an answer. "Excuse me?" was the best he could come up with, as he placed his all but forgotten spork—the forks were still under lock and key—back on the plate and tried not to let his bewilderment show on his face.

"Your last apartment. Do you know its address?"

He did, although he'd only been inside of it twice during his last escape. The first time, it had been to hide and sleep for the night after his breakout, and the second had been to bring back all his belongings that he'd not-so-legally retrieved from police storage, the ones that had been in the house the Joker had unexpectedly given him. The next time he'd gone out of the apartment after that, he'd ended up running from the Batman, thus sparking the chain of events that brought him here.

But he still knew the address. He'd used the apartment before that breakout. It was the place where he'd been residing before the Joker had decided to steal all his things and put them outside city limits in the former home of a mob member. It wasn't the wisest of places to return to, but none of the other tenants had ever seemed suspicious of him during his previous stay, and it did have the advantage of the landlord already being traumatized into avoiding him. That sort of thing took time, the sort of time he didn't have immediately after escaping Arkham.

Not that he told the Batman any of that. He was too busy trying to puzzle out what the man would want with his address in the first place.

"Jonathan?"

Hearing their hated enemy speak to his other half on a first name basis snapped Scarecrow out of his own reverie instantaneously. "Of course I remember where it is. It may be hard to grasp, thick as you are, but not everyone else's head is empty enough to rent out space."

The Batman just stared for a moment as Scarecrow continued to scowl and Jonathan tried to work out why he hadn't been hit yet. "What?"

"Idiot."

Jonathan couldn't see the Bat anymore, as Scarecrow had chosen to stare down at the plate instead, but the sigh he heard made the other's expression clear nonetheless. "Then you know the address."

"Obviously."

There was a moment of awkward silence before the Batman had to make things even more awkward by speaking again. "What is it?"

"What on Earth makes you think I'd tell you?" Scarecrow had raised his head to glare at the man, now moving his gaze downward at the spork, contemplating whether or not he should throw it at the Bat and what the odds of hitting his eye were if he tried. Jonathan, still calm enough to maintain the self-preservation instinct, took control of their hand and kept it firmly in place.

_Killjoy._

_If by killjoy you mean not suicidal, then yes._

The Batman had a similarly controlled expression, looking as if it was taking all he had not to sigh again. "What is it with you?"

"Excuse me?"

He shook his head, avoiding eye contact as Jonathan so often did. "Nothing. Never mind."

Scarecrow was absolutely not going to "never mind," and was thinking of the most offensive, possibly vulgar way to say so when Jonathan took charge of the situation. "Why do you care what the address is?"

_Jonathan. What are you doing?_

It took him longer than it should have to answer, because in all honesty, he had no idea. Avoiding a fight was the abridged response, but if that was his only goal, he ought to have just kept his mouth as still as his hand. It hadn't occurred to him at the time, which also should to pass as an excuse, but even he didn't buy it. Speaking should not have been the unconscious response, considering his hatred for the Bat.

Still, he couldn't not give an answer, so the one he gave was _To get information._

_Bullshit._

Damn mental connections and his habit of forgetting them at the worst possible moments. _Look, I'm tired. You of all people should know how draining these last few weeks have been. I don't want to get into a shouting match with the Batman, and I don't want to sit there in silence and set him off asking what's wrong every two seconds again. We might as well find out what he wants with the address._

Scarecrow was quiet in a way that suggested he was searching for something contrary to say. It was a silence Jonathan had heard often throughout his life, following many things he'd said aloud and even more of his thoughts.

_You can't tell me you're not curious._

_Not enough to talk to the Bat. _But he was. Jonathan wasn't the only one who'd forgotten to restrict the mental link. And he wasn't the only one dying to know what sinister purpose the Batman could have that required their address.

"I want to bring your things here."

_That _was unexpected. There was nothing in the Batman's gaze, expression, or posture to suggest that he was lying, which only made the pair all the more suspicious. The Bat didn't perform such acts of charity. Not for people like Jonathan Crane. "I don't believe you."

"Jonathan." There was something new to his voice. It wasn't pleading—Jonathan could only imagine how much he would have savored the moment if it was—but it was imploring, in a way. And with that same unnerving straightforwardness as his explanation. "Why else would I possibly want your address?"

"As if I've got any idea what goes on in your sick mind," Scarecrow said, taking control once more. From his tone and the sudden stiffness to their posture, Jonathan got the impression that this argument wasn't about to end any time soon. Wonderful. Even with the sleep he'd gotten, he was still exhausted, and the last thing he wanted was to started shouting and possibly throwing sporks at the Bat.

He did sigh this time, so loudly and for so long that Jonathan was honestly surprised he wasn't gasping for air by the time he finished. "Fine. You win. I really wanted to go over there and vandalize the place, or steal everything and sell it online, because I'm not overworked enough as it is without adding onto it. You're right. That makes perfect sense."

Jonathan considering pointing out that his workload was entirely his own fault, or asking how much he did at Wayne Enterprises to begin with, but the headache he felt building up told him it wasn't worth it. The idea of the Batman being anywhere near his things made his stomach clench, but he fought the feeling—and Scarecrow's protests—and spoke anyway. "If I tell you, will you just go and stop talking?"

"Yes."

So he did.

* * *

"You're not, uh, really taking that, are ya?"

Abigail unplugged the television, the screen flickering from _A Night at the Opera _to darkness, implying that yes, she was taking it. Not that the Joker needed that visual to make it apparent; the glare she was fixing him with made it all too clear.

"Look, I don't wanna sound inconsiderate of your feelings here, but don'tcha think you're being a little—"

"Bad Jackie!" It was a tone of voice that ought to be used for dogs, or very small children. Not dangerous, anarchist clowns. God, how he wished he could get his hands around her neck again. "Bad!"

The Joker was very much beginning to regret giving her a name for him. He had no idea if that was his name to begin with—probably not, considering how very unreliable his memory tended to be—but fake or genuine, a name simply wasn't as scary as a title. Too human. At least she was using it to treat him like an animal. It balanced things out again. "I don't see what you're so mad about."

She looked as if she wanted to smack one of his casts with all her might, and possibly bludgeon him with the television as well.

"Really, I don't. No matter how much you like to play dress up with me, I'm still a guy, ya know. Guys have needs; it's only natural—"

"Don't you even start." A flush came to her checks, one from anger rather than embarrassment. "I don't care how bored you were—and that's the worst excuse I've ever heard, by the way—"

"It's not an excuse." Really, it wasn't. He was going mad with cabin fever, starting to hate everything about his limited conversation partners, and had gotten more than a bit sick of watching reruns and Hallmark movies day in and day out. It had been one thing when Batsy had him locked up. At least then, he could _move._

"Quiet." She paused in her attempt to lift the television, setting in back down on the dresser to run her hands through her thick, dark hair, already on end from all the wringing she'd done to it earlier. "When _civilized _people are bored, they ask for a book, or a CD or something. A game of Sudoku or a crossword. They _don't _start pleasuring themselves on my _Little Mermaid _sheets!"

Christ. People got so pissy when you ejaculated on their childhood nostalgia items. "Masturbation is a natural thing. You can't fault me for it."

"Just watch me. You want to get off? Fine." She looked absolutely psychotic when she was riled up like this. It was amusing, but not nearly as much as it could have been if he wasn't at her mercy. "But why couldn't you have asked for a few tissues first?"

"That, uh, didn't cross my mind until it was a bit late to ask. I didn't want you to be overwhelmed by the sight of my manhood were you to walk in with—"

"Oh, you wish. You're average at best."

The Joker scoffed so hard that he ended up choking on his salvia for a good thirty seconds. "You take that back."

"No." Abigail had the look of a woman who knew she was digging her own grave and further knew that she was too enraged to care. "Is that why you dye your hair green downstairs? To detract from your utter normalcy?"

If he glared any more fiercely, his eyes would set fire from the effort. "You just moved to the top of my kill list."

"Please. I can be over the border by the time you get out of that bed and you know it. Anyway, if you really wanted to protect my innocence, you wouldn't have started screaming "Batman" at the top of your lungs. Listen, you, I grew up with those sheets. They survived my wear and tear of my childhood and I'm not about to let my idiot houseguest destroy them with his…fluids. It doesn't matter to me if you're bored or hot and bothered or anything else; don't you even _think _about rubbing your rhubarb on this bed again without—"

"Whoing my what?" That little euphemism was just odd enough to make him drop his current line of thought, the one about how much more interesting she'd look without her jaw.

"I'm not calling it masturbation." She sounded perfectly matter-of-fact while still seething with rage. It was a talent that impressed him, albeit grudgingly. "Masturbation implies a normal, healthy act, and what you did was just sick and wrong. Though if the rhubarb one bothers you, we could call it the beef strokin' off."

"Abigail, I truly think you've lost it."

"Or fisting your mister. Or doing the five knuckle shuffle. Or going on a date with Rosie Palm and her five sisters. Or jerkin' the gherkin. Or choking the chicken. Or taking the sausage hostage. Or cleaning the pipes. Or sending out the seamen."

"You can, uh, stop now."

She didn't. The Joker had heard tell of people speaking in tongues while under emotional duress, and wondered if this was something similar. "Or roughing up the suspect. Or tenderizing the tube steak. Or flogging the log. Or feeding the geese. Or beating the dolphin."

The Joker pulled a pillow over his head. It didn't block her out in the slightest.

"Or painting the ceiling white. Or polishing the trombone. Or shaking hands with the unemployed. Or yanking the crank. Or finding Nemo—"

"_What_?"

"Oh wait, that last one was for girls."

"You do realize you're just making me want to sully your sheets all over again, right? Being all, uh, annoying like that."

"Look at this, Jackie."

He pulled the pillow off of his head to see a swatch of fabric dangling in his face. Corduroy and pink. Not a bright or outrageous pink, but a subdued shade, like cotton candy or a baby blanket. He didn't like the expression on her face as she dangled it there. Not one bit. "What's that?"

"A sample of several yards of fabric I got on sale. And if you don't start to behave, I'll make a coat out of this, put in on you, and send the pictures to _The Gotham Times. _I'd make a matching vest too. Maybe in plaid."

Screw tearing off her jaw; she wouldn't have any extremities left once he was through. "You wouldn't dare."

"You're right. But I will stop bringing you your bedpan."

"Anika—"

"Ani believes in treating a mermaid princess with the same respect that I do." Spoken like Disney marketing's dream come true. "And Adrian isn't going to play nurse to you, so unless you want a liquid diet and a catheter to go with it, I'd suggest that you stop cleaning your rifle over my possessions."

"Do you have a death wish?"

"You can't kill me, I'm the only one who makes your pockets just the way you like them. If you promise to behave, I'll let you keep the TV."

All her extremities torn off, and all her organs taken out. That's what he was going to do. "And if I refuse?"

"I take the TV. And the Batman doll."

_Oh, that bitch. _"Fine," he muttered, clutching the doll with the force only a depraved clown was capable of and wishing with all his heart that he could find another seamstress once he got out, so he could kill her without remorse.

* * *

AN: "Never rub another man's rhubarb." -The Joker, in the 1989 _Batman _film.

So yeah...I've sort of got no idea where any of that came from. I've wanted to do a euphemism overload for some time, so there's that, I guess.


	30. Boxes

AN: And the Never-Ending Costume, as my grandmother and I have dubbed it, is finally finished! Mostly, anyway. For all intents and purposes. I managed to make my eyes go wonky from all the stitching though. I really need to learn that reading glasses are for more than just reading.

In other news, due to a crazy random happenstance that, for once, was not my fault due to being stupid with technology, but rather the fault of a catapulting cat, my laptop is now missing a key that I can't just snap back into place because the underlying holdy-in piece is broken. I called tech support about this, and they're sending me a replacement keyboard. Apparently, they expect me to be able to switch it out myself. I predict that I'll either end up calling the Geek Squad or breaking the entire thing. Let's hope it's the former.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

_You…you gave him our address. _The hand holding the spork tightened, by Scarecrow's accord. Jonathan couldn't decide if he was about to snap the utensil in half or drive it into his own hand as punishment for Jonathan's betrayal.

_Yes. _There was no point in making excuses. Scarecrow, having spent his entire life with Jonathan, knew him better than anyone else on the planet and would see straight through any justification his other half could produce. Likewise, Jonathan knew Scarecrow just as well, and knew that the only thing to be done in such a situation was to let his other half rant until he ran out of steam.

He just hoped Scarecrow wouldn't start yelling. His voice wasn't subject to dampening from the other sounds of Jonathan's surroundings, and the volumes he could reach were painful, when he wanted them to be. _I'm sorry._

_Why did you do it?_

Jonathan winced at that one. The tone of hurt in his words was bad enough, but when they conversed, there was more to the words than just the manner of speech. Their mental connection lend something else to their conversations, when it was open, and it was wide open now. A sort of understanding to their thoughts, something that dug past intellect and emotion and landed straight in the soul that Jonathan could never decide if he believed in or not. Scarecrow wasn't merely angry. He was betrayed and hurt, and Jonathan could sense those feelings every bit as strongly as Scarecrow was experiencing them. _I don't know._

_What good did you possibly think would come of it?_

_I wasn't thinking._

_Bullshit. You're a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. Don't try and tell me that you didn't have some motivation for giving him the address._ In spite of the interrogative tone of voice, the hurt remained. It was at that moment that Jonathan remembered overriding Scarecrow's concerns had been what got him ditched in the first place.

Why was it that his brain only caught up with him after he'd already done something idiotic?

_I just wanted him to go away. All right? It was stupid, and I'm sorry for it. But I didn't think he'd ever stop asking and I've been exhausted ever since you left and I still am, and I didn't think I could take it if he just sat there and asked over and over and over, and I didn't want you to provoke him into locking us up or responding with violence. I shouldn't have done it. I know that, and if I had the chance to do it over I would have—_

_Jonathan. Breathe._

_Sorry._

_I know that things have been hard without me. I know that hard doesn't come close to describing about it. I've been through it too. And I'm tired too. But you can't compromise your principles for the sake of your comfort._

Since when was Scarecrow the insightful one? He'd been the one to throw away their morals the moment the Joker let himself be groped—though to be fair, Scarecrow had never been as sexually reserved as Jonathan. Still, he was the half that tended to become distracted from whatever goal they were working towards in favor of anything that looked to be entertaining, exhilarating, or pleasurable. And he was the one who tended to rally for whatever got them out of a dangerous situation the fastest, as he had when he'd tried to talk Jonathan out of standing up to the Joker on Halloween.

He'd let himself be so broken by the circumstances that he and Scarecrow had completely switched in regards to responsibility. Disgusting.

He took a moment to consider the implications of that, decided that he didn't _want _to consider the implications of that, at least not until he was better rested, and cast about for a change of subject. _Do you think he was being honest?_

_Who?_

_The Batman. About bringing clothes and the like here._ It seemed too good to be true—and what did that say about his life, that the prospect of properly-sized clothing seem too good to be true?—but he couldn't imagine that his enemy particularly liked the fact that Jonathan was parading around in his obnoxiously expensive shirts. Though the man could have every article of clothing Jonathan wore burned and replaced without making the tiniest of dents in his finances.

_No. I don't believe it for a second._

He sounded so sure. Jonathan wished he could have that same certainty. How he'd ended up on the fence between belief and distrust, he wasn't sure, but he was stuck there despite his best efforts. _What do you think he's doing there, then?_

_No idea. You're the shrink, so tell me: he obviously gets some perverse thrill out of terrorizing and dominating others, so do you think he'd be the type to get off on looking at his victim's belongings and reveling all that he's taken from them?_

_What?_ Well, _that _was a horrifying and unwelcome mental image if ever there was one. Jonathan was torn between the urge to vomit and the need to scrub his eyes with bleach.

_You're right; that's a bit much even for him. Though I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is a turn on for him, in some way. But it's more likely that he's trying to come up with a way to send you back to Arkham. Cover the apartment with pictures of Bruce Wayne, maybe, and then tell the cops that you broke into his home, so it'll look like you're an obsessive stalker as opposed to his prisoner. Or something like that._

If that was the case, good. Jonathan wanted nothing more than to be out of this manor, and Arkham would be easy to leave. And no matter what the Batman tried to pull to cover it up, Jonathan knew the truth. He could achieve a great deal by blackmailing the Bat—if he ever got out.

Still, he couldn't shake the absurd feeling that the Batman could be telling the truth. It made no sense. He'd taken everything that Jonathan had achieved in life, without remorse, and Jonathan wouldn't trust him as far as he could throw him, which would be no distance at all. But he'd held Jonathan's hand and let himself be followed without complaint, for no discernable motive. Convenience, maybe, but it would be much more convenient just to lock him up. And there was the day he'd spent with Jonathan in February, even if that had been just to drag him back to Arkham.

Logically, there ought to be no ambiguity to Jonathan's feelings. But there was, and he couldn't shake it, despite his best efforts.

* * *

Bruce was once again struck by how normal Jonathan Crane's apartment looked.

Both the last apartment he'd been in and the man's briefly used house had the same unsettling normalcy as the place he found himself standing in now. The others had been a bit more off-putting, as they'd both had furniture and a lived-in look to them—Jonathan kept his dwellings as immaculate as he did his garments as a doctor, but there was still a feel of occupancy to the places—but this apartment achieved it quite well on a lesser scale. The boxes stacked in an orderly fashion around the room and the mattress on the floor gave it the look of a recent move in, or a college student packing to go home for the summer. Aside from the traps he'd set around the door as with the last apartment, the ones that would spray toxin outward if the doors were opened by force, it could have been anybody's home.

Certainly, it didn't look as if it belonged to a mad scientist who'd stolen sanity with drugs and ruined lives with fear. There were times when Bruce actually preferred criminals like the Joker, who at least wore their madness and depravity out on their sleeves. Those were rare times, but this was one of them.

_There's a time and a place to reflect on the faces of evil, _he reminded himself, crossing the room toward the boxes, _and it's not while you're in the wolf's mouth. _Jonathan had been the one to explain the toxin traps to Batman, back in February. It was entirely possible, and likely, considering how paranoid the man was, that he'd come up with other ways of safe-proofing his home. Bruce couldn't afford not to be alert, and philosophical meandering definitely did not qualify as alert.

The boxes were all shut, and most taped. They were still labeled as property of the GCPD, but that was hardly a guarantee that they hadn't been opened, booby-trapped, and sealed again. Concealing a death trap in a box full of something Jonathan would more than likely end up needing seemed ridiculous and counterproductive, but in Bruce's line of work, nine times out of ten it paid to be cautious.

He slid on the air filter he'd brought with him, and carefully pulled the tape from the nearest box. The contents shook slightly from the movement, but only just. Whatever was in there had to be tightly packed. Bruce didn't have to open it; free of restraint, the cardboard flaps lifted somewhat upward on their own. He took the risk of leaning forward to see inside, to be met with what looked to be, from the silver he could see, books.

Slightly mollified but still cautious, he opened the box the rest of the way.

Books. Aside from chemicals, that had been the thing he'd most expected to see. Most would prioritize while on the run from the law, selecting things essential for survival, or worth money. While Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Hemingway were respected and classic authors, Bruce doubted that the paperbacks he was looking at were of any great value. He'd never heard of Gilman, Ellison, Danielewski and several of the others, but none of the books looked to be old or priceless, and the others he did know of, like Palahniuk, weren't even considered literature.

He got the distinct impression that Jonathan Crane would keep books of great monetary worth as opposed to selling them, anyway.

He shuffled through the volumes, considering whether or not he ought to bring these with the more practical things, like clothing. The manor's library was sure to have the classics, and the space inside the Tumbler was limited. Yet he imagined that making do with someone else's books would be for Jonathan akin to sharing a friend's bed when homesick at a sleepover. Helpful, yes, but lacking the familiarity needed to be truly comforting.

And he wanted the man to be comfortable, even if such a thing should be a nonissue when compared to problems of containment or how he was going to get Jonathan back into Arkham. He was brilliant, if mad, and Bruce knew that he'd twist the situation to his advantage, at any given opportunity. Or reveal the truth out of spite, if Bruce refused to bend to his will.

Still, being captive had put Jonathan through visible agony. Unintentionally, but that didn't make the memories of Jonathan sobbing on his shoulder or screaming himself into shock after the water incident any less striking. God only knew how long he'd be stuck in Wayne Manor like an unwanted house pet. It didn't help matters in the least if he was miserable.

And judging by his bizarre mood swings from earlier in the day, Jonathan was either too ill or too stubborn to make things easier on himself by cooperating. Bruce could only hope to ease the pain of captivity by giving the comforts he could safely provide.

The second box contained toiletries: shampoo, shaving cream, razors, soap, and the like. There was no way he was allowing the man anything bladed, apart from nail clippers, and the manor had those on hand. He consented to the glasses cleaner, as Bruce doubted Alfred would want to share his with a narcissistic supervillain, and the shampoo and brush. The soap he left, as it was unscented and the manor had enough of those to keep from wasting space storage space in the Tumbler on. Likewise the toothpaste was discarded, as he and Jonathan used the same type.

Having toothpaste in common with a nemesis was not something he'd expected, and far more unsettling than it had any right to be.

The box after that was full of DVDs, CDs, and even the odd VHS tape, though the apartment lacked a television as far as Bruce could see. Movies were not something they had in common, as Bruce had known from the last time he'd been there. Jonathan's taste in films drifted towards horror, classic, musical, and box sets of shows about girls fighting vampires and robots watching bad movies. His music preferences were mostly classical, though there was the odd soundtrack or two—Bruce hadn't been expecting _The Nightmare Before Christmas_—and more than a few mixed CDs featuring artists he'd never heard of. He closed the box and set it to the side with the others he intended to take back. The plastic in the cases—not to mention of the cases—could be broken and used to cut, but so could many, many things in the manor, if one was properly motivated. And he couldn't see Jonathan destroying his belongings, even if he was suicidal.

He opened the next box to discover that Jonathan wore boxer-briefs, something he'd never cared to know and would now never be able to forget.

The next few boxes contained clothing, all of which he decided to take with him, apart from the belts. They were no more of a risk than the bed sheets in the guest room as far as suicide, but easily used as a whip or other makeshift weapon. Bruce would have to remember to put his own belts somewhere off limits.

The last box was halfway filled with psychiatric texts, and the other half full of notebooks. A flip through one revealed Jonathan's handwriting, and the chemistry equations scrawled over the pages made it clear that this was full of toxin research. There was no way Jonathan was getting his hands on that. Restricted of chemicals or not, he was still a genius, and there was no telling how innovative he'd become with the notes before him as opposed to only in his head.

No, it was better just to leave them here.

And yet…Bruce couldn't help but recall Jonathan's words regarding the stethoscope, about how he didn't have anything like that. It was true; none of the boxes contained a photo or memento, be it from friend of family. Jonathan's life had been his research, and these notebooks had to be the closest thing to a treasured keepsake that he had. Bruce couldn't let him have them, obviously, and his Batman side urged him to leave them behind, but it seemed wrong, somehow, to let them waste away here, evil as the contents were.

So he decided to take them to the manor for safekeeping.

* * *

AN: I imagine Jonathan is a fan of most classic writers, not just the scary ones. Also, I have ridiculous, massive, asexual crushes on Chaucer and Hemingway. Have you read Hemingway's dialogue? The man was a god.

Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his novel _Fight Club, _but best known to me for his utterly horrific and disgustingly graphic short story _Guts, _about terrible accidents that occur during masturbation. Really. He reads it aloud on tours, and I believe thirty people have fainted hearing it so far. It draws you in with humor, but it's really creepy and sick. Should you wish to torture yourself, you can find it online through Google.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Harlan Ellison, respectively, are the authors of the short stories _The Yellow Wallpaper _and _I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream._ Both of those can also be found online through Google, and they're both terrifying. Gilman's is especially bad because it's based on true events—she was really treated that way—and Ellison's…well, it's about a supercomputer that can bend reality to its will and hates humanity beyond powers of description. It starts with the computer having destroyed all humanity besides five people, and the people have been its plaything for one hundred and nine years. And it just gets worse.

I imagine Jonathan as a _Mystery Science Theater 3000 _fan because, come on. All they do is watch awful old horror or sci fi films. He'd love it.


	31. Lingering Need

AN: As it turns out, tech support didn't even bother to send instructions for switching out the keyboard. Lovely. Thank heaven for online tutorials, or I'd have ended up paying a hundred and twenty nine dollars for the consultation fee alone. Technology. As dependent as I am on it, it still hates me.

In other news, I just got the _Watchmen _DVD, and feel completely clueless for not realizing until now that the opening credits montage (which you should all look up on Youtube, regardless of whether or not you care to see the film, because those are the best credits ever) features _Thomas and Martha Wayne _being saved from a gunman outside of an opera house. There are Batman opera posters and everything! How did I miss that the first five times I watched it? Also, why is the movie only available in widescreen?

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan closed his eyes for what had to be the hundredth time since lying down, making what he knew would be a futile effort to fall asleep. Again. Exactly why he made the effort when he knew it wasn't going to work was beyond him. There was no comfort in going through the motions, just the ever-increasing knowledge that his attempts were failing, and time kept slipping by while he remained conscious.

It became all the more unbearable when he considered the fact that he always seemed to be able to fall asleep until he actually needed to. The first two weeks or so of his time spent living alone with the Joker had flown by thanks to his habit of sleeping in place of interacting with his forced companion. If he could make himself sleep in place of hanging out with a deranged clown, he really ought to be able to make himself sleep in place of lying on top of the bed—Scarecrow had refused to get under the very soft and comfortable covers; his reasoning being that they were allowing themselves to become too relaxed here—and reflecting on the misery that was captivity.

Of course it didn't work that way. That would be too easy. And not cruel enough to him.

It didn't help that, being a psychiatrist, he knew all sorts of horrific diseases and disorders with insomnia as a symptom, and his mind tended to run through them when he was sleep-deprived and nervous at once.

_Scarecrow?_

For a moment, there was no response. He realized their connection was closed and felt a brief and mild panic at the thought that Scarecrow might be asleep—or, what passed for him as sleep—leaving Jonathan all the more alone.

_You do not have fatal familial insomnia. If you did, you couldn't have slept earlier, could you?_

So not asleep, then, just thinking privately. Good. _That isn't what I was going to ask._

_What, then? _There was still impatience in his voice, though the tone had softened. Jonathan knew he was still angry about the address, even without the mental link to verify. They'd shared their lives together, and over two decades of constant interaction had taught Jonathan very well that Scarecrow held grudges. Even toward his other half, though never as greatly or as long as with others. And Jonathan couldn't say that he didn't deserve it, idiotic as he'd been in giving the Batman information.

At least he wasn't expressing his anger. For Scarecrow, that was selfless.

_Jonathan?_

He snapped out of his reverie and back into the present situation. _I…I don't know. _Insomnia at inopportune times wasn't something new. That had been his life from his teens onward, and probably even before then. He'd long since adjusted to it, so there was no need to be bothering Scarecrow about it now. It wasn't fear at their situation, either. He'd gotten over that way back when they were imprisoned in the cell, though it had briefly resurfaced when they'd discovered the Batman's identity by accident. There was no reason to drag his other half into a conversation, especially considering that Scarecrow usually "slept" before Jonathan did, and their body was in need of whatever rest it could get, considering the circumstances.

Exactly why this current inability to sleep was affecting him so much, Jonathan wasn't sure. But the fatigue and nervousness felt heightened, mixed with something else, something familiar that Jonathan couldn't quite recognize, despite his best efforts.

_Is this about the Batman?_

Batman. Jonathan could almost feel his mind shift into place, like the last twist to solve a Rubix Cube. Which wasn't a perfect metaphor, as the realization only served to exacerbate his emotional upheaval, but it was the best he could come up with in the circumstances. The unidentified emotion, much to his disgust, was loneliness.

Loneliness. Presumably for the Bat.

His throat did that closing up thing that it tended to do whenever he got especially panicked, which only made things worse, especially combined with the sudden urge to be sick.

_Jonathan?!_

He forced himself to breathe as steadily as he could, swallowing hard. _I'm all right._

_No, you're not._

Loneliness. For the Batman. It was nothing short of a miracle that he was able to keep his end of the mental link closed in these circumstances. That…that was sick. No, sick didn't come close to covering it. There weren't _words _for how wrong it was. Yes, he'd been dependent on someone for companionship, and the Bat had unfortunately filled that role, but now that Scarecrow was back, there was no reason for it. There shouldn't be a lingering need—

_A lingering need. A lingering _effect.

He stopped hyperventilating, though his heartbeat had yet to slow. He wasn't sure why that particular thought had brought some stability to the situation, but it had, and he forced himself to relax until he could remember what it was. It only took a moment before it came to him.

Years ago, in college, he'd heard of an experiment in which the participants wore a special kind of goggles that made them view the world upside down, to see how the mind and the eye would handle the visual information presented that way. At first, it was disorienting and nauseating for those involved, but as the experiment progressed, the participants adjusted, to the point where their minds began flipping the images to see upside down as right side up. And once the experiment ended and they removed the goggles, they saw the unaltered world as upside down for a time, until their minds readjusted again. As a lingering effect.

That's what this was. A leftover, nothing more. He'd needed companionship without Scarecrow, and had to settle for physical contact, because the Batman obviously couldn't provide the mental connection. It hadn't been nearly as good, but he'd had to settle for it to keep from falling apart, and adjusted to leaning on the man or holding hands as substitute for what he'd had. Now Scarecrow was back, but the desire for physical contact hadn't faded instantaneously.

The knowledge that it _would _fade steadied his heart rate considerably.

_Jonathan._

_Really, I'm okay. _He took the deepest breath he could, grateful that his lungs seemed to be working again. _I just panicked myself over something stupid. It's nothing._

_It is not nothing. What's wrong with you?_

That was the one downfall to having another half. Even when they weren't sharing thoughts, they knew each other better than anyone else. So Scarecrow knew when he was hiding something. Much as he knew that Scarecrow would not take the "I kind of still want the Batman to hold my hand" thing well. At all. And Scarecrow was the convincing liar, not him.

He opted to go with the partial truth. _Batman._

Scarecrow didn't need to say or even think it for Jonathan to clearly sense his response of _Ah._ He could barely remember how they'd functioned before being truly separate, before they'd had this understanding. _What about him?_

_I…what do you think he's doing there? At the apartment?_ Jonathan had been giving all his effort _not _to consider that, after Scarecrow's "getting off" implication from earlier, but now that he thought about it, the idea of the Batman laying hands on any of his possessions made him cringe. It was one thing to imprison him and rob him of his sanity, but if he defiled any of the books…

Sad, really, that _that _would be the motivation for Jonathan to find the physical strength to kill him barehanded.

_I think your priorities are kind of fucked, _Scarecrow informed him, mirroring his own thoughts. _I mean, half of what you own is textbooks and you always speed through the best parts of the fiction—_

_I think you and I have a very different definition of "the best parts." Pervert._

_At least I'm not completely repressed._ There was no malice in his words, only humor. Good. Things were returning to normal. If only the longing would hurry up and fade.

_Whatever. Really, what do you think he's doing?_

A shrug. _Nothing good. He might bring the clothes back, if only so he won't have to let us "desecrate" his. But that'd be the most of it, I think. The rest will end up in police custody, or Arkham's, or something. He wouldn't just leave them there, but it'd go against his code to destroy people's property, I think._

Typical. Flipping cars and plowing through buildings were par for the course in the Batman's chases, probably justified as a necessary evil, or something, but he'd draw the line at personal belongings. Tangible ones, anyway. He obviously had no issue with wrecking someone's sanity for the sake of revenge, or letting people die as opposed to giving into demands. The hypocrisy was sickening.

Though not quite sickening enough to break through that damn need. Stupid subconscious conditioning. _Are you sure?_

_It's impossible to be sure with him. But I don't actually think he's over there jacking off on your copies of Jung, if that's what you're worried about._

Jonathan felt his face flush. _Do you have to keep bringing that up?_

He shrugged again. _My mind goes to dark places. Particularly when I'm bored._

_I'm glad to know you find our plight boring._

_I don't. But you can't say there's much excitement to be had in staring up at the ceiling. Are you all right now?_

"All right" was hardly a term congruent with their present situation. But he had stopped panicking, and that was something, anyway. There was still that relentless if subdued longing, but Scarecrow would be happier without hearing that. The last thing his alter ego needed upon returning was to hear that Jonathan still couldn't shake the desire for interaction with the Batman. It would be the worst kind of insult. _I think so._

_Good. But let me know if you start hyperventilating again, okay?_

_Okay._

It didn't take long for Scarecrow to lose consciousness, which seemed to be the way it always worked. That might be some form of a defense mechanism, when he thought about it. Since Scarecrow didn't truly sleep, just black in and out, he was less subject to awakening from external stimuli. Jonathan could be an insomniac to protect the body for as long as he could while Scarecrow was out, before the need for actual sleep took over. Like an inborn defense mechanism passed on since the dawn of man, had prehistoric man had two selves in one body.

Whatever it was, it was something he'd never been able to unravel and probably never would, so he was content to let his thoughts wander on it until, after what felt like a great deal of time later, he finally fell asleep.

* * *

He woke before Scarecrow.

Again, nothing unusual. He was the first to wake over ninety percent of the time, unless they were heavily drugged. Then, Scarecrow tended to take that place. Why that was, Jonathan had no idea, unless the drugs subdued the waking self more.

What was unusual was the fact that it was still dark. Jonathan had difficulty in falling asleep, but not staying out. It took extremes to wake him, such as bright light, loud sound, nuclear holocaust, or Joker snuggling. He sat up, taking his glasses from the nightstand and sliding them on.

The Batman was in the room. Well, that would do it.

"What are you doing?"

The second he got a closer look, the question became redundant, as the Bat leaned down to set a box on the carpet. So he'd come back for the night, changed into ordinary clothing, and dropped of the boxes. Which could have waited for morning—not that Jonathan wanted to be dressed in the Batman's things any longer than he had to—but he supposed the Bat wasn't exactly mindful of other people and their need for sleep.

"Did I wake you?"

He waited for Scarecrow to make the obligatory sarcastic response. Nothing. His other half was still asleep. Which wasn't surprising, as, judging by the lack of light in the windows, it was still several hours before they should even think about waking.

He stood, reluctant at the idea of getting any closer to the Batman given this innate and idiotic desire for contact, but curious to see which boxes of clothes his captor had brought. It looked like all of them, from the number. He hadn't even known he'd had this many boxes of clothing.

The Batman was offering some apology for disrupting him, something about how he could go back to sleep. Jonathan ignored him, picking up the nearest box—far heavier than a cardboard container full of fabric had any right to be—setting it on the bed before he opened it.

He froze.

"Jonathan?"

He was staring down at box full of books. Psychology books. The one on top was a textbook, one that he'd nearly forgotten about, from long ago, much of it woefully outdated by now. But he'd kept it anyway, as it had been the text for the first psychology class he'd had in college, a reminder of the first and only time in his life that he'd been truly happy.

"Jonathan?"

Jonathan's immediate and unthinking response was to turn toward the Batman and hug him as hard as he could.

* * *

AN: Fatal familial insomnia is a genetic condition in which the victim loses the ability to sleep entirely. There's no cure for it. In the early stages of the disorder, those afflicted get sleep, just not deep enough to do the body good, but in the later stages, the ability to sleep at all is lost. The really scary thing about it is that it goes on for _months _after you lose the ability to sleep. I don't know how that's possible without dying after a few days, but from what I've read the afflicted can live for up to nine months without sleep. And no, sleeping pills don't help. They just push those with FFI into a restless coma.

I heard about the goggles experiment years ago in high school. I'm shaky on the details, but it should come up on Google.

Tomorrow I'm working from eight in the morning to ten at night again. I'm trying to do some more writing tonight, so I can have a chapter out either late tomorrow or earlier Thursday, but now that my mom's just made blackberry cobbler I fear I may be tempted away from the laptop. Either way, I'm not working on Thursday, so barring unforeseen circumstances, I'll definitely have a chapter then.


	32. The Boatman

AN: This chapter's kind of gross. Just so you know. I meant to have it out earlier, but it just did not want to be written. And don't worry, we'll be right back with Jonathan and Bruce in the next chapter.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Darkness.

Scarecrow found himself enveloped in it, darkness in every direction as far as his eyes could not see. In theory, there should be nothing unusual about that. He knew, in some strange innate way that he didn't understand, that the dark place he found himself in was not Wayne Manor. And Jonathan wouldn't have made an escape attempt without informing him, so it led to reason that he was still unconscious.

The issue being that he never actually experienced the unconsciousness. Scarecrow's periods between the waking state were nonexistent. Like turning off a computer instead of letting it hibernate. He only described it as darkness because it was a void, and he lacked another way to describe it. In and out. On and off. Even when he'd found himself in Jonathan's dream, the periods before and after that moment were completely blank. Unconscious was the logical conclusion, after eliminating the other factors, but the scientific method was Jonathan's forte, not his, and evidence aside, that couldn't be right.

It had better not be right, because he didn't think he could stand experiencing this void for an extended period, even if the period only extended for a few more minutes. Oblivion was all well and good, but _consciousness_ during oblivion? Fuck the demons and the lake of fire Jonathan's grandmother had always spoken of, _that _was hell.

He was struck by a sudden and powerful panic at the thought, strong enough to send shivers through him, feet almost drumming against the floor as a result—_Wait, floor?_

He forced himself to be still, and observe more about his surroundings than the darkness. Yes, there was a floor beneath him, cold and wooden, and that alone was enough to lessen his panic considerably. An empty void was one thing. A void with a floor to it ceased to be a void and moved back to something his mind could comprehend. He leaned back in relaxation, to feel his head brush against something. Fabric, by the feel of it. Somewhere above the fabric there was the faintest of metallic rattlings, and that combined with the closeness of the drywall he felt when he reached to either side lead him to the conclusion that he was sitting in a closet.

Then Jonathan had wandered somewhere while Scarecrow was out and fell asleep. He could handle that.

His eyes began to adjust, taking in the light in from the gap between the closet's door and the floorboards, a small and continuous line of it from one edge of the door frame to the other, save for one thin dark spot in the middle that was blocked by something he couldn't make out. How he'd missed the illumination before, he had no idea. Maybe the light outside the closet had just come on.

Scarecrow stopped moving, listening for any movements, Bat-like or otherwise. From the other side of the door there was no sound. He placed his hand on the doorknob, preparing to turn it, and paused. _This is not Wayne Manor._

Things went dark for a moment. Not dark in the sense of darkness, as the closet he found himself back in, but dark as in unconscious oblivion, the "sleep" he had always had. It was comforting, as far as an experience he was amnesiac about could be, but he didn't have time to reflect on it. This was not Wayne Manor. The scent was wrong. The Batman's manor had that newly-made smell to it, like freshly-cut wood and house paint, and all other physical manifestations of absurd wealth. Under that, it smelled like cleaning supplies and well-cooked food, and, so faintly Scarecrow could barely register it, like something burnt, no doubt a remnant of the soot that still clung to the reused bricks, despite cleaning, or that lingered in the ground.

This closet, and by extension, the house, had the faint scent of mildew and water damage. Of spider webs and bug carcasses, and the floorboards beneath him had a strange feel, as if warped by heat. The darkness of the closet was a familiar darkness, a special kind of dark that he remembered from their childhood, back when scary things like closets and cellars had seemed to have a different sort of blackness to them. A place that had once been a manor as well, falling apart but too stubborn to admit it by the time Jonathan was born there, a façade that everyone could see through but that no inhabitant would acknowledge.

The air in Georgia was different than the air in Gotham.

He felt panic again, and disgust, both forceful enough to make his stomach churn. This wasn't right. He wasn't in Georgia. That much he knew. But he couldn't be dreaming. _Jonathan _was the one who dreamed, and he refused to believe that captivity had affected him so badly as to turn that constant dynamic on its head. _This can't be happening._

_Pull yourself together. _Hyperventilating unto vomiting, as he made himself acknowledge, was not going to improve the situation. He was not Jonathan, and he did not suffer emotional outbursts. Much as he _did not dream._ This was _Jonathan's _dream, like it had been the last time. He just needed to find his other half this time, and make Jonathan wake up, make him stop whatever behavior it was that dragged Scarecrow into these dreams. Or break out. Get away from the Bat, and their problems would almost certainly stop.

He opened the door, to experience an unfamiliar and bizarre sensation as he did so, something long and thin flickering at the bottom of his vision at the same time. Scarecrow looked down to see a piece of yarn, bright red in color, tautly stretched from somewhere past the foyer of the manor that the closet opened into, outside his line of sight. The other end of the yarn, to his confusion, seemed to be attached to _him _somehow, disappearing into the fabric of his shirt between two of the buttons. Bewildered, he unbuttoned the shirt.

And found that the yarn disappeared into his chest, right in the center where the sternum should be. The wound where it entered was bloodless, with a faint golden glimmer that he took to be straw visible around the yarn, the same color as the straw on his clothes. The skin around it looked too smooth to be human, which he took as a sign that he looked as he did in Jonathan's last dream. He opened his mouth and felt the gentle tug of the cord stitched through it, confirming the suspicion.

He tried pulling on the yarn. Nothing. Whatever was inside him that was holding it was holding tight. It felt slightly wet, though there was nothing on his fingers when he let go.

_Jonathan. _Finding Jonathan was the important thing, not the random images that his other half's subconscious fired during rapid eye movement. He buttoned the shirt, standing, and the yarn stretched with him. Then he stepped into the foyer, and felt that indescribable sensation again as the length of yarn that should have gone slack slid inside of him instead.

It didn't hurt, exactly. It was as if the stuff was winding around a spool within him, and the disconcertion of it made up for the lack of pain. He blacked out again, briefly, then gathered his resolve and forced himself to move.

It felt _wrong._ Not only the sensation of something being pulled into his insides, but the house itself. Something had changed, and what that something was, he had no idea, but everything was different because of it. This wasn't just the place of misery where they'd grown up. It had moved past that into something far worse. The very air itself, while still the air of Georgia, seemed to hang heavy, as if saturated with the sickness that had warped the rest of the house. It was all the same, but different, twisted, as if by some invisible, malevolent force.

"In the blink of an eye, you may suddenly feel that your world's been invaded by all things unreal."

Scarecrow froze at the voice, one he knew all too well, and one that he further knew had no place in Georgia. He began to turn, only to feel hands grab him, holding him tightly in place.

"Ah ah ah, not finished yet. They slink up behind you and don't make a sound, but there's nothing to fear—" And he was jerked around, roughly, the yarn pulling tightly as if threatening to snap. "If you don't turn around. Scarecrow."

"Joker?"

"Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys." The Joker was somehow wrong as well, beyond the incongruity of his appearance in Jonathan's old home. His makeup had changed, both in shades and textures; the paint around his opened scars was almost black. His eyes were empty voids, as they'd appeared in Jonathan's hallucinations, but with occasional and brief flashes of white to them. And he smelled worse than ever, like rotten meat. "It is strange for you to be here. I would have guessed that this is before your time."

He swallowed hard, trying to force back the nausea the Joker had inspired. There was no point in questioning the man on their nightmarish surroundings. The Joker had no view of the normal manor to compare it to, and he never gave straight answers. "Why are you here?"

"You may think of my as your Charon, if you like. But to the dream world, not the afterlife. I do not suppose you have coins to pay the boatman?" He held out one hand with an expression of mock seriousness, before breaking into an abrupt coughing fit. Scarecrow noted that his clothes looked as if moths had been feasting on them.

"I do not dream. I never have."

The Joker stopped hacking and straightened, wiping his mouth. The red and white smeared, revealing discolored skin beneath. "Then it would seem the Sandman finally caught you."

"I do not dream."

The Joker took his hand, the makeup on his glove rubbing against Scarecrow's palm. It hardly felt like paint at all. "Some legends say that the Sandman steals the eyes of children who do not sleep. Others have him rubbing sand into the eyes until they are blind and bleeding. I am glad that he did not take yours. I want them to last. For as long as they can, anyway."

Even in Jonathan's subconscious, he made no sense. "Enough. Where is my Jonathan?"

A shrug. "He does not come down here anymore. Misfits, remember?" He cleared his throat, the sound horribly wet. "We're a couple of misfits, we're a couple of misfits. What's the matter with misfits? That's where we fit in. Or, you will be. You are still connected."

Before Scarecrow could ask what that meant, the Joker started coughing again, harder this time. Something hit the floor, and Scarecrow looked down to see maggots writhing on the graying boards. He looked back at his companion.

The Joker was rotting.

What he had taken for lipstick was blood, as the Joker always had around the mouth wounds, but old blood, dried. It was flaking, his lips bluish beneath. The white around his face and the black around his eyes sockets were not paint. They were mold, and the flashes of white in the eyes were maggots.

"It is not as bad as it looks." The Joker wiped his mouth again, his skin sliding sickeningly when it was pushed. "Well, it is, but at least the gloves keep the fingers on."

Scarecrow wasn't sure if he wanted to scream or vomit. "What has happened to you?"

"I was not needed. None of us were."

"Us?"

The Joker tugged on Scarecrow's hand, pointing at the floor like an excited child. For a moment, all Scarecrow saw were the maggots, covered in the rot that had to be coating the Joker's insides, and then, lying on the floor, was something that might have been might have been furry and soft long ago, mildewed and deteriorating, yellowed stuffing poking out of its many rips.

"Harley is here as well." The Joker glanced around, but she did not appear. "She has been here longer than I have, by several months."

Scarecrow imagined what she would look like by now and felt suddenly cold. "I need to find my Jonathan."

"It does not hurt. This, I mean." The Joker gestured to himself with his free hand, smiling. Scarecrow could not tell if the smile was meant to be comforting or if it had a darker intent. Whatever the emotion, his face no longer moved the way a living person's would, so it looked more disturbing than anything else. The termites in the smile didn't help either.

"I need to find my Jonathan."

"We are cut off. Everything is." He waved his hand around at the room, bits of tattered purple fabric falling as he did so. "Have you not noticed the sharp decline in the _feng shui_?"

He pulled his hand free and grabbed the Joker's shoulders, pulling them face to face. The scent of rot was all but overpowering. "Help me find my Jonathan or leave me alone."

Another moment of the darkness. Why it wasn't lasting, Scarecrow had no idea. He would have given anything to be back in the dark, unaware of all the terrors that Jonathan's mind invented to torment him further. But of course that didn't happen, because that wouldn't have been cruel enough.

"You," the Joker said brightly, "are not very intelligent."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

The Joker snapped his fingers against the yarn, the resulting sound less like someone plucking a guitar string and more like someone blowing across the top of a bottle. It hurt, though not greatly. At the same time, he was stuck by a wave of emptiness and despair, as if the Joker had reached inside and torn his heart out. He sank to the floor, gasping.

"What else do you need, a map?" The Joker extended his hand and pulled his friend up, when he took it. "And Scarecrow?"

He flinched away from the Joker on instinct, never wanted to feel that sensation again. "Yes?"

The Joker did reach out, but only to pat him on the shoulder. "Be on your guard. Here there be monsters."

_What monster could possibly be worse than you? _But he only nodded, turning away.

"In the back of your mind," said the Joker, from behind him, "there's a hole open wide, where darkness is creeping in from the outside."

_If only._ He felt shaky from the encounter, and sickened. He'd only arrived in Jonathan's last dream when Jonathan had caught sight of him, so why had this one carried on so long without the intervention of his other half?

"You can light rows of candles to cast the dark out, but it's always there hiding in shadows of doubt."

Scarecrow had just made up his mind not to respond to that when the darkness took him again, this time mercifully until he woke.

* * *

AN: I see this chapter as going on while Jonathan was still asleep in the last one. I can see one part of the mind in the early stages of the sleep while the other is awake, but not REM sleep.

Charon is the boatman of the River Styx in Greek mythology. The dead would have coins placed on their eyes or in their mouth to pay him when they got to the afterlife.

The Joker's ending and beginning rhymes both come from the poem _Shadows of Doubt, _by Neal Shusterman. I discovered the poem sometime in intermediate school and it immediately became one of my favorites. I was kind of a creepy child. Well, more than kind of.

The Island of Misfit Toys and the "We're a couple of misfits" bit both come from those old stop-motion Rudolph films.

Both of the Sandman stories are actual interpretations of the mythical figure. Personally, I always thought the idea of having sand poured in my eyes was creepy enough without losing my eyes or bleeding.

"You've got termites in your smile" comes from the song _You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch._


	33. Hate

AN: And once again, it's time to show off an awesome fan art from an awesome reader. Lily Mae Ray made one of the Joker in the last chapter, seen here: i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ Shadow-Selves-The-Boatman-by-6Annab. jpg

As further proof that I have no life, has anyone else noticed that the letter E on the US dollars looks somewhat like the Batman mask when you turn it on its side? Why, yes, I do see Batman in anything and everything. No, it's not a problem. I can stop any time I want. Probably.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The only response Bruce's mind could come up with in regards to the psychotic ex-doctor with his arms wrapped around him was to stand there and wait to wake up. Because clearly, he had to be hallucinating. Things like this simply did not happen. It was a law of the universe, or close. The earth revolved around the sun, an object in motion remained in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, and criminals did not hug the vigilantes that locked them up. It was impossible, and therefore it could not actually be happening.

Several seconds later, he was still standing there with Jonathan Crane's arms around his midsection, and Bruce was forced to admit that villain-hugs might not be impossible so much as improbable. And this seemed less like a hallucination the more he thought about it, as aside from the hugging, nothing else about his situation seemed any more nonsensical than usual. So the embrace, contrary as it was to everything Bruce had come to expect about the ways of the world, appeared to be genuine.

He also didn't appear to be letting go.

The room's temperature seemed to raise by about a hundred degrees, as temperatures were wont to do in awkward moments. How long had they been standing like this? Ten minutes? Half an hour? In actuality, it was probably closer to "less than ten seconds" but this was such a surreal occurrence that it seemed to have affected his perception of time as well. Besides, the contact between them usually lasted all of one second before Jonathan seemed to remember his hatred for Bruce and shove him away.

"Jonathan?" It occurred to him right as the word left his mouth that speaking to the man might not be the best of ideas at the moment. For now he was calm, and probably half-asleep, but talking to him would remind him exactly whom he was hugging. While he was willing to accept contact, however reluctantly, Bruce doubted that he enjoyed the knowledge that the contact came from someone he hated so much. His violent reactions to being touched could well be sparked by the reminder that it was Batman touching him.

So it was all the more flooring when Jonathan's actual response was to hug harder, possibly in an attempt to block that knowledge out. He muttered something, rendered unintelligible by the fact that his face was all but buried in Bruce's sleeve.

He weighed the benefits and the risks of talking again. "What?"

"You brought my things back."

"Yes." Against his better judgment, he felt pity. There was a time and place for such feelings, and it was not when the man who'd poisoned him on multiple occasions, among other transgressions, was clinging to him like an attention-starved puppy. But it was hard, even with the Joker's escape to serve as a cautionary tale, to be stoic when someone was hugging him and speaking in a tone of absolute astonishment. "I said that I would."

"But you actually did."

Jonathan Crane had expected him to lie. Expected Bruce to be as cold and heartless as he'd been to the people he'd used. It should have been disgusting, that the man assumed he would sink to that level. And in a way, it was. But he couldn't stop himself from feeling that pity, even if it wasn't deserved. What did that say about a person, when their worldview dictated that human interactions were a series of manipulations, designed to get ahead without empathy or regret?

It didn't justify his crimes, not in the least.

But it did serve to explain them, depressingly well.

"Yes. I did."

Jonathan fell silent, considering. He still had yet to let go, making this the longest period of time he'd held onto Bruce calmly, aside from the times when he'd had a mental breakdown clouding his judgment. His hold had loosened somewhat, but it was nowhere near loose enough to gently push him off. Bruce wasn't sure that he wanted to, anyway. Bizarre as this was, and terribly as these situations tended to go, it if helped Jonathan to understand that Bruce wasn't trying to trick him in some way, it would be worth it, however unnerving.

"Why?"

Bruce had never needed to explain human decency before. He'd never realized that it was something that needed to be explained. "I don't want you to be miserable, all right?"

For a long moment Jonathan stood, silent. Then he hugged harder than ever and, without warning, jerked away just as quickly, eyes wide awake and burning with anger.

_I don't want you to be miserable._

Seven words. Nine, if he added "all right". They weren't difficult words on their own, and they weren't difficult when put together. "I don't want you to be miserable" would have been a statement simple enough that he wouldn't have to think about it for his mind to process and understand it, had it come from someone else, in another situation.

But it didn't. It came from Batman, who was letting himself be hugged by his enemy after providing said enemy with all his belongings, and it was too complex for his mind to take in, try as he might to break it down to the elements, to something he could understand.

He ought to let go, retreat to another corner of the room or a different part of the manor, get away until he could figure out what sort of trick Batman was trying to pull. It had to be a trick. The man who ruined his life so callously, without so much as a backward glance once he'd thrown Jonathan aside in the basement of Arkham, would not actually care about his happiness in captivity.

But he found that he couldn't let go. The lingering need for contact had yet to fade, and each time he tried to pull away he ended up holding on tighter, the desire strong as ever despite that it should be more than sated from all the hugging.

Thus he was stuck embracing his worst enemy while he tried sorting this out, which was disconcertingly far more comfortable than it had any right to be. He didn't know what this boded, but he knew that it didn't bode well.

He took a deep breath and tried to look at it logically. Batman had poisoned him. Batman had been the one to block his escape from the parking garage and have him sent back to Arkham. Clearly, Batman had access to the antidote by the time he'd poisoned Jonathan, or both he and Rachel Dawes would have been permanently damaged. Batman had been responsible for all of his failures, aside from the one caused by that aforementioned, thankfully departed ADA. Batman was holding him captive. Batman apprehended criminals. He did not get them breakfast and bring them books and care about their wellbeing.

Only, he _had._

It had to be for his own benefit, somehow. Considering all the other nonsense he filled his time with, he wouldn't waste it on acting kind un less there was something to be gained. Winning Jonathan over made Batman's life easier, certainly. But then, so did locking him back up in the cave and having the butler bring him food. Maybe the latter would be too cruel and unusual, but considering the way he'd unapologetically broken the Joker, Jonathan doubted it.

It couldn't be actual compassion. It _couldn't._ Bruce Wayne was nothing more than a spoiled rich brat using the death of his parents to give justification to running around playing a glorified and potentially deadly version of Cowboys and Indians night after night. Jonathan had a lingering attachment disorder that had yet to fully go away, even with Scarecrow's return, and that was all there was to it.

Except that it wasn't.

Giving him books had been one thing. That was placation. But why retrieve Jonathan's personal books when he already had a library? Why go to that effort? From the number of boxes, it looked as if he'd brought everything Jonathan had. The manor had more than enough to provide for a captive, or even several. There was no logical reason to bring Jonathan's things here, just as there was no logical reason to walk Jonathan down to the kitchen as opposed to bringing him food.

Of course, logic and the entire concept of Batman got along like fire and water, but still—

He wasn't able to finish the thought, as Scarecrow abruptly woke and took control.

* * *

It was one of the few times in his life that Scarecrow had felt fear.

No, that wasn't true. Fear was not a rare sensation for him, even if Jonathan was the one to feel it more often and potently. He felt it often, but rarely for _himself._ His fears, like a parent or an older sibling, were almost always directed toward Jonathan. Fear that his grandmother would get carried away and do irreversible damage, or that his classmates might go too far in their "fun" and inadvertently kill him. God knew they were sadistic enough. Fear that he'd be killed during a drug transaction, or beaten into a coma by the Bat, or set aflame by the Joker. That Jonathan would let all the suffering he'd been through break him and end up shooting himself while Scarecrow was unconscious.

Those, he felt often, and in varying degrees of severity.

Fear for himself was something else entirely. It was Jonathan's body to begin with, though he'd had residence there for almost the entirety of his other half's life. People knew Jonathan, interacted with him. When they threatened the body, they threatened Jonathan. It was hard to try intimidating something that they didn't know existed. When it came to himself, he was usually fearless.

Until now, anyway.

He woke up horrified and clinging tightly to the nearest thing for comfort, oblivious to the fact that what he was holding was warm and human and, quite distinctly, the Batman. He could have been hugging onto the inner spikes of an iron maiden, for all he cared. He needed _something_, some anchoring point to assure him that the godawful nightmare he'd woken from was truly over.

And how had he had it in the first place? He didn't dream. He didn't even truly _sleep._ Jonathan was the one with the nightmares, the one who woke up shaking or screaming and needing to be held. Scarecrow was not subject to the fears that haunted Jonathan's subconscious, as his entire reason for being was to provide a shield against those fears. Christ, what was this place doing to him?

The fact alone that he'd dreamed would have been disturbing enough without adding in the content of that dream. He wasn't the psychiatrist, and the dream was already fading, as Jonathan's nightmares did when he tried to explain them, but he had a good idea of what his subconscious had broken the established order for. And that implication moved things from horrific to hellish.

As did the realization of just whom he was hanging off of.

He straightened immediately, hands flying back as if he'd been burned. He was shaking, from fear and confusion, and overwhelming anger. _Jonathan._

His other half flinched. _It isn't—I was thinking when—_

_Shut up._ He forced himself to be still, giving the Batman a glare that managed to make him look intimidated in spite of their small stature and lack of any real fighting ability. "Get out."

He didn't move, of course. That same look of moronic confusion that he'd worn the last time they'd switched was back, but accompanied with annoyance. Scarecrow got the feeling that that wasn't a good sign. If he'd been able to calm down, he might have cared.

"I don't care what I just said," he snapped, before the Batman could even start. "Now I'm telling you to leave me the hell alone. So go."

The irritation was displaced by the bewilderment, if only for a moment. "What you just said?"

Wonderful. Jonathan had started digging their grave and now he was unwittingly finishing. "Fine. By all means, stay. _I'll _go." He brushed past the Bat with as much force as he could manage, making it one step out the door before a hand closed around his wrist. It didn't hurt, but he knew if he struggled, it could become excruciating.

"We're talking. Now."

* * *

It was with that word that Jonathan found himself forced back into control, without warning. _Scarecrow?_

_Finish it. _His voice was acidic. Not shouting, thankfully, but soft and low, almost a whisper. It managed to convey his rage every bit as well as a scream would have, and be terrifying besides. _You're the one who started this, so finish it. Get him out of here._

_I—_

"What's wrong?" Batman's hands were on his shoulders now, and tightly. His voice wasn't concerned so much as angry. A controlled anger, but anger nonetheless. "What do I keep doing to set you off? Because I'm sick of having you throw fits every time I think you've calmed down, and I'd really like to avoid it."

"I—I don't like being locked up," he managed, head still spinning from Scarecrow's outrage and sudden transfer of control, and his confusion over Batman's intentions. "And as you're so fond of reminding me, I'm a mental patient, so you can't begrudge me for acting out—"

"Bullshit."

Jonathan felt his mouth fall ever so slightly open. Batman wasn't supposed to counter him. He was supposed to get angry and storm off.

_Maybe he would if you hadn't been cuddling him. What the hell were you thinking?_

He winced at the volume of that thought. _Please stop yelling. I wasn't thinking, all right? It was a spur of the moment reaction, and I don't—_

_Shut up and get rid of him. Now._

Loud enough to make his head throb, that time. "Stop yelling."

Batman's expression softened somewhat, which would have added to his confusion at the man's intentions if he weren't too busy cursing at himself—with Scarecrow's unwanted assistance—for speaking out loud. "I'm not yelling. And this isn't just because you're locked up. You weren't like this before. What is going on with you?"

"Nothing. Nothing's going on. Look, I was half-asleep when I—" he swallowed hard—"touched you, and then I came to my senses. That's all there is to it."

_As if that's an excuse._

_You're not helping. If you haven't noticed, he brought back—_

_I have noticed, and that's no reason to go throwing yourself into his arms like a crack whore being offered a line of coke._

_At least he gave me something. You leapt onto the Joker with no provocation whatsoever, didn't you?_ He shouldn't have said it, as he knew while the words were coming out, but he couldn't help himself.

The shouting that followed was more than ample as punishment, loud enough to cause pain and all but deafen him to the outside world. _Stop. Please. That _hurts.

No effect, of course.

"You're hurting me. Stop."

"I'm not." He felt Batman's hands loosen and blinked, confused, before realizing he'd spoken aloud again. "Listen, Jonathan. I'm not trying to make you unhappy. Really, I'm not. I know that you hate being here, and that you hate me, but it doesn't help if all that you do is—"

"I don't." Again, he spoke without realizing it, but this time Scarecrow fell silent.

"What?"

"Hate you. I don't." Jonathan felt his eyes widen at his own words, flowing out of him completely unbidden. He ought to hate Batman, he knew, for everything he'd been put through, but standing here with everything he had returned to him and the Bat _not _screaming in his face despite Scarecrow's provocations, he found it hard. The man had poisoned him, beaten him, locked him up, tagged him, and held him prisoner.

He'd also brought back his books and clothes and given him breakfast. And brought him the meds, when the Joker had flushed his. "I don't hate you."


	34. Processing

AN: Sorry about the delay on this one. Yesterday was another of those days where I worked forever and an hour, and Tuesday I spent with my mom, as it was one of the rare days where she wasn't working or doing something for a college class. We watched _Sweeney Todd _together, which, as always, was awesome, and which, as always, made me crave meat. Yes, I'm sick. As for Monday, I have no excuse beyond lethargy and writer's block. And also the fact that it was the start of the work week.

If I ran the universe, we would have no Mondays.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"What?"

It was, undoubtedly, the least helpful question he could have asked under the circumstances. It was also the only response his mind could come up with at the moment. "I don't hate you" should have been easy to take in, and coming from anyone else, it would be. Coming from someone who had cheerfully poisoned him on more than one occasion, and professed his animosity for Bruce with nearly every breath, it was about as simple as processing the same statement in Dutch. It just didn't work.

Jonathan looked as taken aback as he must have, brows furrowed and eyes drifting, as if his mind was also trying to work out what he'd just said. As far as facial expressions went, it was minimal, but from someone who excelled at keeping a stoic expression under most circumstances beyond breakdowns, even if his voice and body shook, it was surprisingly emotive. "I…I'm not repeating myself."

It was then that Bruce noticed what the dim light of the room had hidden up to that point; Jonathan had gone completely white. Either the realization had been as much of a surprise to him as to Bruce—and unwelcome, from the look of it—or he'd been that way since he'd gotten angry, and it hadn't been apparent until now. Whatever the cause, he looked several seconds from fainting. "Okay. That's okay."

"There's nothing okay about this." He raised his hands to his temples with a wince, rubbing as though he was trying to erase the last few minutes from memory. Bruce was inclined to agree, but managed to keep quiet about it. There was a time and a place for interaction-altering revelations, and it was not in the middle of the night when both of them were half-asleep and unable to fully comprehend it.

Not that he could say any of that, obviously. Agreeing might only make Jonathan's panic worse. All the stress he put himself through was unhealthy to begin with, and adding to it was most assuredly a bad idea.

"Really, it's all right." He crossed behind Jonathan, trying to ignore the slight twitch to the man's shoulders as he did, and removed the box that had started this madness from the bed. "Do you want to lie down?"

"It's not." Exhaustion appeared to combine with confusion, and Jonathan let himself sink to the floor, leaning against another of the boxes. He was still pale, expression almost pained. This couldn't be psychological shock, could it? Bruce was fairly sure one had to be more incoherent than this to be in shock, but it was hardly an encouraging thought. "I hate this place."

"I know. Here, come on." He closed the space between them, extending his hand. Jonathan didn't look up. "You need to sleep."

"I _was _sleeping." He raised his head then, eyes accusing. Like all of this was Bruce's fault for putting the boxes in the guest room. So much for trying to reduce the man's suffering. Well, no good deed goes unpunished, as the saying went. Bruce didn't expect things to go smoothly, but did wish that for once in his life, the unpleasant effects could manifest at a time when he was actually prepared to deal with them.

"Yes, and I'm sorry I woke you. Come here."

Jonathan stared at Bruce's hand, leaning forward a bit as if to take it before moving back again like he expected to be hit. "I think—" His face gave a strange spasm which Bruce took to indicate that he was stifling a yawn—"that I'm fine where I'm at."

"You're about to fall asleep on the floor."

"The carpet is soft enough." He looked away, the same sort of shake to his voice that had been there earlier when he'd asked Bruce to sit with him.

"But it's not as warm as the bed. And you don't like being cold, do you?"

Jonathan brought his eyes to meet Bruce's again. Beneath the haze of sleep and confusion, Bruce could almost see the gears in his head turning, trying to work out his captor's motives. "I'm not cold."

"Not yet. But you've only been sitting there for a minute, and body temperature lowers in sleep. Besides, warm air rises."

Jonathan gave him a sleep-deprived glare, but consented to taking his hand. "Stop being nice."

"No." He pulled him up, gently, nudging him in the direction of the mattress. He reflected on the last time he'd put Jonathan to bed, when the man had been sleeping under it. Back when Jonathan had hated him and life had made sense. He wasn't sure which he preferred: the hatred and the relative stability, or the mere dislike and the chaos.

"Why do you care, anyway?"

He pulled the sheets back so that Jonathan could lie down, then pulled them back over him. "Because I don't hate you either."

* * *

_Jonathan?_

Scarecrow had stayed, for the most part, entirely silent after Jonathan's unplanned and unwitting confession that the total detestation he felt for Batman was no longer so total. Aside from a very loud "_What_?!" anyway, one so loud it had made Jonathan wince. Now he was back, pacing around like an overexcited and feral animal.

He cringed, as much as he could through his sudden fatigue, anticipating what was coming. He didn't think he had the injury or the stability at the moment to deal with another shouting fit. Had Batman remembered to give him the last pill? He couldn't recall.

Not that it made much difference. Skipping one wasn't enough to bring back the madness. _I'm sorry._

He felt a hand brush his forehead and gave a startled jerk—hadn't the Bat left already?—before realizing that no one had touched him at all, and that Scarecrow was only supplying the sensation. He thought back on the rare occasions Scarecrow had given the mental equivalent of a slap and shuddered. _I mean it. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—_

_Shh, it's okay. _He felt the sensation of touch again. _I shouldn't have screamed at you, Jonathan. I was angry at him. It didn't give me the right to take it out on you._

His eyes widened in spite of the exhaustion. _You…you're not angry?_ It wasn't like Scarecrow to say such things. Not that he'd never apologized, but when he did, it was always along the lines of "Yeah, sorry, can we move on?" This was more like the type of communication he'd learned in psychology classes, the type Scarecrow never used and that he employed only rarely. It didn't fit his other half at all.

Unless Scarecrow thought he'd gone completely mad and was trying to humor him. Wonderful, even the voice in his head thought he'd catapulted into the deep end.

_Of course I'm angry. Angry doesn't cover it. _His voice went as cold as the manor, and Jonathan shivered again in spite of the warmth from the blankets. _But not at you._

_Oh._ That ought to have been enough to satisfy him. For the first time since Scarecrow had woken up, he wasn't pissed at Jonathan, and someone as brilliant as he was should know better than to threaten the delicate and sudden peace with questions. It was like opening Pandora's box; so clearly a bad idea that a person would have to be a complete fool to try it.

Unfortunately, brilliance came hand in hand with curiosity, and he was unable to avoid sating the latter, even if it meant pissing off the only friend he had here. _Why not at me?_

_Because this isn't _your _fault. You didn't ask to be made a prisoner._

_But I_—he swallowed, unsure of how to say it. He was still shocked by the fact that he'd admitted it at all, and he couldn't imagine the blow that must have dealt to Scarecrow. _I said—_

_I know._ His voice was suddenly harsh. It was the tone Jonathan had been expecting when he started the conversation, but it made him flinch nonetheless. _And it made me _sick_. But that's not the point, Jonathan._

He didn't dare to ask what the point was. _I didn't mean to say that. I…I didn't plan on it. I don't know what came over me._

_I do. The Batman._

_What?_

_Don't you see, Jonathan? This is exactly what he wants. He's trying to make you complacent so that you'll be a willing captive. That's why he brought the boxes. It's a trick to gain trust. Exactly what the Joker did whenever he gave you something or acted affectionate._

Jonathan felt himself flush in disgust at the memory of how easily he'd let himself be deceived. Once bitten, twice shy, they said, but he'd witnessed Harley fall for the manipulations, both in person and from his conversations with her, before the Joker had ever even flirted. And now he'd done the same thing with Batman.

But even knowing that, it didn't feel as if Batman had been faking.

_He's better at it than the Joker, _Scarecrow conceded bitterly, letting Jonathan know he'd forgotten to close their mental link. Fatigue tended to do that. _Probably because he pretends to be a defender of the people all the time anyway._

_Why… _Intellectually, he knew his other half was right. So why the hell were his emotions twisted like this? Had his mind started to betray him even while medicated? _Why doesn't he just drug me, to keep things complacent?_

Try as he might, Scarecrow couldn't completely keep the irritation from his voice. _One, because he wants to think of himself as a good person, and good people usually don't get their prisoners high for the sake of convenience. And two, he's not a doctor and he's probably afraid of doing permanent damage if he fucks something up._

Again, it made sense, so why this unwanted and uncomfortable feeling? Why did his mind keep reminding him of things like the fact that someone with Batman's resources and connections could easily and confidentially consult a medical professional on the long term sedation of a patient on antipsychotics?

_Jonathan . Listen to me._

He forced himself to stay alert, despite wanting nothing more than to sleep and stay asleep until life starting making sense again. Which, at the rate things were going, was likely to be several millennia from now.

_I know he's being "nice." And I know it's confusing. But you have to remember _who _you're dealing with. You can't forget what this man did to you just because he brought you pants that actually fit, all right?_

He hadn't even thought of the pants yet. Thank God. Batman had never seen it fit to provide a belt—no doubt considering it too much of a risk in case Jonathan went self-destructive again—and there was nothing beyond freedom that he was looking forward to more than having pants that he didn't have to hold up as he walked.

_Jonathan!_

That one wasn't painful, but it bordered on it. _All right. I'm sorry._

_Just…_Scarecrow sighed. _Sleep, okay? Things should make more sense in the morning._

He could only hope. And wonder, as he drifted off, why despite Scarecrow's certainty, Batman's concern seemed so genuine.


	35. The Rose

AN: So the site wouldn't let me log on last night, and rather than take the opportunity to write something and just wait to post it, I ended up watching _Coraline _for the first time, because I'm lazy. If it's any consolation for the wait, I don't think I'll ever be able to get the Other Father's song out of my head now. Curse They Might Be Giants and their ridiculously catchy music.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bringing the boxes, Scarecrow decided, as he watched his other half dress, was the Bat equivalent of the time the Joker had given Jonathan a rose.

It wasn't the first time in either case that the manipulator had given them something. The Joker had given them food, clothing, and an escape from the asylum. The Batman had given them antipsychotics , food, and books. But like the rose, this latest gift carried more impact than any prior offerings, and marked a change in Jonathan's emotions.

The rose from the Joker had been the catalyst for the moment Jonathan had fallen for him.

Not that there hadn't been a build up before that. The Joker had been trying his damndest to snare his unwilling roommate up to that point, with all the flirting and kissing other random niceties amidst the madness. Why he'd been so interested in attracting Jonathan, Scarecrow still wasn't sure. Lust, maybe, or as a tool to keep him complacent. It could be simply for the fun of creating chaos, as had been the Joker's excuse. Scarecrow distrusted anything the man said, but that did seem the most likely. Whatever the reason, there had been a buildup. The rose had been more like a final push than the flip of a light switch. However it was defined, it had marked the point when Jonathan's confused longing and Scarecrow's lust—as, unless there was direct stimulation, he tended to be the one who felt lust—became overwhelming and there seemed no other recourse but to give in.

The rose had also seemed completely innocuous at the time. It wasn't until after the bloody end to the whole thing and the second rose on Christmas that they came to view it differently.

And, as he could tell from their link, Jonathan was similarly oblivious to the darker intent of the boxes.

Scarecrow was at a loss for how to explain it without degenerating into a yelling fit as he'd done the night prior. Tactful was not an adjective that could be used to describe him. Neither, in most circumstances, was patience. Another screaming match could well attract the Batman's attention again, and this time Jonathan might not be able to allay the suspicions. Scarecrow had no idea how the Bat would react to finding out that his captive was really two people, but considering the captor in question was the Batman, it couldn't be good. The man was very obviously a twisted, self-righteous maniac, and how Jonathan thought for even a second that he could genuinely care was beyond Scarecrow.

But he did. He was conflicted about it, but that didn't change the fact that he was viewing the boxes as an act of kindness.

_How can someone so intelligent be such a complete idiot?_ And _that _was the reason he'd kept his mouth shut so far. Jonathan was the one with the eloquence. Scarecrow was the one with the "yell and/or insult until the point gets across." Joker had used that technique as well, but not as often, and Jonathan had put the Joker's thoughts ahead of Scarecrow's on nearly every occasion. It took leaving Jonathan to make his point about being ignored the last time.

Knowing that his other half's response had been to cling to the Bat when last he'd left, Scarecrow was more than a bit hesitant to repeat that lesson.

He noticed then exactly what article of clothing Jonathan was pulling onto their body and stopped contemplating the deeper issues, for the moment. _Jonathan._

_What?_

_You're wearing a sweater vest. _At Arkham, their psychiatrists had suggested Jonathan's lack of relationships was due to overwhelming narcissism and an inability to connect or emphasize with others. Scarecrow was of the opinion that it was entirely due to the fashion sense of his other half who, unfortunately, did all the clothes shopping.

_This mansion is freezing._

_So put on an actual sweater. You know, with sleeves._

_Those are all deeper in the box. And I'm not going to unpack them; that would be akin to admitting that I've adjusted to captivity._

Scarecrow should have been relieved that Jonathan hadn't become completely complacent. He would have been, if not for the knitted navy abomination over their torso. _What do you have against sleeves, Jonathan?_

_What do you have against sweater vests?_

_Common sense._

_You know, _Jonathan said, standing, _out of all the things to be unhappy about in our present situation, I'd say my choice in attire ought to be fairly low on the list. For someone with "common sense," anyway._

So he still wanted out. Thank God. Not that Scarecrow had really expected otherwise, but in such mad circumstances, anything was possible. _Where are you going?_

_Breakfast._

Scarecrow began dragging their heels. _Can't this wait until the Batman is gone?_

_Seeing as how he's the one with the antipsychotics that I need to take right about now, no. No, it cannot._

Damn. There was that. Scarecrow really needed to find a way to steal those back. The Bat couldn't carry them with him at all times, could he? It'd be rather eyebrow-raising if someone found hardcore psychiatric drugs in Bruce Wayne's possession.

_Jonathan?_

_What is it?_

He had no choice but to proceed, even if he had no idea how. He couldn't stand idly by and watch Jonathan fall for this. It was too dangerous. For both of them. _Remember that rose the Joker gave you?_

_Which one?_

_The first one._

He felt Jonathan's discomfort at once, all the anger, sorrow, and shame that the memory brought about. _Yes. Why?_

_What did you think of it, when he gave it to you?_

There was a pause, and when Jonathan spoke again, it was stilted, rushed. It couldn't be clearer that he didn't want to remember it. _I—that…that yellow roses don't represent love?_

_I meant emotionally. _He was successful at hiding his irritation, for the most part. Why did Jonathan find it so hard to admit to past mistakes? They were over, it wasn't as if he could change or deny them now.

_Conflicted. I…he was sending mixed signals, and I had no idea if he was serious or not. The rose—it didn't seem…I thought it was bizarrely sweet, I guess. But still confusing. Why?_

_Because that's what the Batman is doing. When he brought your stuff here. It's like the Joker's rose._

Another pause, as Jonathan considered. _Do you think so?_

He sighed, probably more forcefully than necessary. _Of course. Don't you?_

Jonathan didn't answer, as he'd just walked into the kitchen to find the Batman seated at the table.

* * *

The idea that the return of his personal effect was a tool to gain trust had never occurred to Jonathan, obvious as it now seemed with Scarecrow's rose metaphor.

An attempt at complacency, yes. That one, he'd considered. Something only to be expected when dealing with an unwilling captive. Besides, he'd had people talking down to him his entire life—particularly easy to spot when one was brilliant, and particularly infuriating—so other forms of placation didn't come far out of left field.

But trust, that he'd never considered. It was logical, he supposed, in controlling a person. Something akin to good cop, bad cop, but without the bad. It only made sense.

Yet it hadn't felt that way.

Not that the Joker's manipulations had either, exactly. Jonathan had never had any idea what the Joker wanted, be it love or a willing punching bag. But with the Joker, there had been a shadow of doubt. A worry that everything had been manufactured to take advantage. For all his misgivings about Batman, that one hadn't crossed his mind. Whether or not that was significant, Jonathan wasn't sure.

Then again, he had been half asleep at the time.

"Here." Batman's hand reached out, and Jonathan extended his own, expecting the pills to be dropped in it. Instead, the Bat only pointed to the opposite side of the table. In front of one of the chairs sat a glass of water, and the medication.

Jonathan wondered if this was how it felt to have a parent make one's lunches. At Arkham, giving the pills directly to the patients had been standard and infuriating practice. This ought to be every bit as patronizing, but he found that it didn't seem worth the effort to get angry about.

He didn't trust himself to say anything that wouldn't be baiting or idiotic, so he only sat down.

"Do you want anything else before I go?"

Jonathan very nearly gagged on the water he was drinking, annoyed. Why did he insist on doing that? He forced himself to keep his mouth shut. The last thing he needed was to destroy the odd and likely temporary peace that had sprung up between them.

"You haven't gone back to the silent treatment, have you?" The tone was light, but with an undercurrent of something Jonathan couldn't place. Concern?

_Of course it's not concern. Don't fall for it._

He steadied himself, and resolved, no matter how tempting, not to say something that would get him hit. "Why do you do that?"

"What?"

"Hover around me like a mother hen. I believe I've said that I find it enraging."

Batman looked as if he was holding in a sigh now, for whatever reason. If he found talks like this exasperating, he shouldn't do things that he'd been told set his "houseguest" off.

_He's an idiot. What did you expect?_

"Because I don't want you to be miserable, and I don't know how else to ask."

"Not saying the same thing over and over would help," Jonathan muttered, focusing on the glass of water. "Why are you trying to be nice in the first place?"

_Don't ask him that! He's going to lie to you._

Batman ran a hand through his hair, eyes cast downward. In the instant that took, it seemed as if all the sleep deprivation and strain he put himself through was visible on his face, making him look tired and oddly human. "You know, this may be hard for you to believe, but I'm not a bad guy."

He couldn't keep from scoffing at that, despite Scarecrow's warning and his own involuntary flinch as he did.

The Bat didn't respond. "Really. I don't want you to be unhappy. I just don't want you to hurt other people."

_Likely story._

Very. And besides, it wasn't hurting people if it contributed to the greater good. Not really. A necessary evil, if anything. "You poisoned me, Batman."

"Bruce."

Jonathan, who'd been very prepared for a response more along the lines of "You poisoned me first" or "you were hurting people" found himself off kilter and at a loss for a repartee. "What?"

_He doesn't have an argument, so he's using this as a distraction. Pathetic._

"My name is Bruce. And I think it might vastly improve the tone of these conversations if you used my name."

Typical. Jonathan highly doubted that Batman was a separate entity inside Bruce Wayne as Scarecrow was inside him. As if calling him something else would alter their history. A Bat by any other name would still be the man who ruined his plans, destroyed his mind, and stole his freedom. "You're still Batman."

"Yes. I am. But that's not all there is to me."

"It's a very large part. Skirting around the issue doesn't change that fact."

He sighed, fatigue showing once again. "Okay. I just think life would be easier for the both of us if we weren't at each other's throats all the time. But if you don't want to, that's fine."

The Bat stood, and Jonathan felt anxiety at the idea of his leaving, more of that need that he couldn't shake. He ought to be furious at being spoken down to, and the not so subtle implications that he was being irrational, but he wasn't. It was all still too surreal to inspire outrage.

"I'm going to work. If you need anything, ask Alfred, all right?"

_As if._

Jonathan was inclined to agree. For an elderly man, he was more than a little intimidating. It didn't look as if Batman was going to leave until he acknowledged the statement, however, so he nodded.

"And…think about what I said, all right?"

_He's trying to turn this around on you. Trick you into thinking you're wrong. That's just what the Joker did. Ignore him._

He nodded again, with both Scarecrow and Batman taking it as assent to their statements. The Bat walked out of the room, and Scarecrow continued muttering hatefully, leaving Jonathan to his own thoughts. The Joker had manipulated him. Used him, and throw him violently aside when he was through. There was no denying any of that.

But even knowing that…weren't they still friends?


	36. Friendship

AN: Remember the author's note for the last chapter, in which I said that I wasn't able to log into the site on Saturday? In another example of glitchy weirdness, while I'm still getting email alerts of new reviews, they aren't actually showing up on the story review page and I can't respond to them, even through email, because as far as the site is concerned, they somehow don't exist. Bizarre. Anyway, if you've reviewed and haven't gotten a reply, that's the reason. If it doesn't sort itself out soon, I'll reply by PM.

In other news, you may have noticed that the link to the costume pictures is no longer functioning. The reason for that is that the site I had the photos on was hacked, and the thread lost. I've still got the photos on my hard drive, but as I've started making the Joker doll that goes with the costume, I've decided to wait until I've got that finished to get it all set up again.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

_Then again, should a person be considered a friend after he's tried to kill you?_

Jonathan ran a finger around the rim of the glass, considering. He didn't exactly have a great number of friends, and those that he did have—an entity inside of him with no physical presence and a handful of various criminal lunatics—could hardly be considered a basis of comparison for what constituted a normal relationship and what did not. Of course, nothing about his life could be described as normal, so he supposed that, for him, Scarecrow and the Arkham inmates were the closest to ordinary that he had.

Besides, someone like Edward Nigma, even with the severe obsessive and mildly narcissistic qualities, was, as far as Jonathan was concerned, much more stability than someone such as Joan Leland—who'd always insisted that they were friends, despite his disdain at speaking to or even being in the same room as her—who actually believed that she could make a difference in her patients' lives. In a place like Arkham, such blind optimism could only be held by someone as mad as the prisoners.

But the varying levels of madness in his friends and the highly subjective definition of normal were irrelevant. Insanity aside, none of them had ever tried to kill him. Isley had slapped him on more than one occasion, and Scarecrow had abandoned him, but his friends had never held a knife to his throat or threatened him with a flame thrower. Not to mention the crowbar to the ribs incident.

That wasn't to say that a relationship with violent beginnings couldn't come to friendly terms. It often did, and had developed that way since the beginning of human interactions. The first epic ever recorded contained such an example with Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the latter of whom only existed in the first place for the former to fight. Just because his life had no prior examples didn't mean that he didn't have such a relationship with the Joker. But the Joker had tried to kill him. And death tended to be rather permanent. Oblivion might be better than much of his life, but the destruction of potential success and happiness had to count greatly against the Joker.

He stopped tracing along the glass, taking a moment to close his eyes and consider. The Joker considered them to be friends. That had been his entire point with the house and Nightmare. That and control. By all logic, he shouldn't feel the same way.

Yet he didn't completely hate him.

He had no idea why. Leftover desire or stupidity or what, he couldn't help it. It was like having a family member with an addiction; repeated trials had showed he wouldn't change, and spending too much time with him was asking to be exploited, but Jonathan couldn't keep himself from caring. It had to be the stupidest emotional need he'd ever experienced.

Well, except for the Batman thing.

Jonathan opened his eyes again and found that the seat opposite him was empty. The realization was accompanied by that same stomach-churning, throat-drying anxiety as always. Slightly lessened after Scarecrow's return, but only slightly. _When did he leave? _Damn his deep thoughts and their ability to block out the rest of existence.

He resisted the urge to get up and seek the man—who'd almost certainly left the manor by this point—out, both out of self-disgust and the knowledge that Scarecrow would not take it well at all. _What is wrong with me?_ Batman had done every bit as much damage to him as the Joker. He hadn't tried to kill him, true, but he had made him mad, which was arguably worse. At least in death, he wouldn't have to deal with hallucinations and paranoia.

And yet he couldn't hate Batman either, despite having every reason and then some to do just that. It shouldn't be that striking of a realization, considering he'd flat out said it the night before, yet Jonathan still couldn't wrap his head around that troubling fact.

He ought to hate him. He _wanted _to hate him. It would make life so much easier. He couldn't even classify what was going on between them, now that he knew he didn't hate the Bat and the Bat had said the same to him. It wasn't friendship. It couldn't be.

But it wasn't merely tolerance either, thanks to this idiotic need.

His thoughts were cut short when Scarecrow stood up. _Where are we going?_ For a moment he wondered if Scarecrow had been feeling that same cursed longing, and was seeking out Batman on the off chance he hadn't left. After all, they often shared emotions. Then he realized how stupid the idea was and shook his head, banishing the thought.

_The Bat's bedroom._

_What?_ Perhaps he hadn't been as off as he thought.

_To find the antipsychotics._ Scarecrow quickened his pace, having faltered in Jonathan's confusion. _Hurry up. Do you w_ant _his butler to catch us?_

_Why do you want the antipsychotics? _Knowing Scarecrow, it would be part of an escape attempt—Jonathan was surprised, now that he thought about it, that he hadn't tried or come up with one in the first day back—but how would the meds figure into it? The madness thing clearly hadn't worked the first time, and Scarecrow wasn't about to try it, opposed to it as he'd been in the first place.

_Because I don't want to be dependent on him. Not for anything more than I have to be._

_He'll just take them back._

_He can try. _Spoken as if he'd forgotten that the Batman was much taller, more powerful, faster, and better trained in combat than they could ever be. _I'd almost rather overdose than give them back._

Jonathan shuddered, eternally. _Please don't tell me you're seriously considering that._

_Well, now that you mention it—_

_It would kill me. _He said it flatly, not needing to emphasize the words for Scarecrow to understand that he was perfectly serious. _It's dangerous enough to do with a healthy person, but for someone with system damage from starvation who's just been through withdrawal and is still under massive stress, it would be absolutely deadly._

_Even if he found you immediately after you did it?_ He sounded hesitant now, thankfully.

_If you want to play Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun, play it with someone whose body you don't share. Besides, he'd arrange some way to have me treated here as opposed to a hospital. He'd be able to pay a doctor to stay silent. And there's no guarantee that he'd prevent me from dying, anyway. _He swallowed hard, ignoring the part of him that trusted Batman not to do that. _It wouldn't be killing me, technically._

_There's making your point and there's over-making it._ Scarecrow was almost smiling. _That would verge from morally gray to morally…very, very dark gray, like black with one drop of white to it. If it doesn't break his rule, it's at least going to crack it._

_You'd be surprised what people can overlook when they want to. Remember that stabbing in Kansas? The news story where all five witness just stepped over the victim?_

_Key word there being "five." _Definite amusement now. _People are more likely to help when they think they're the only ones to be held accountable. Or have you forgotten that bystander experiment your professor lectured on?_

_I could argue that those results only apply when the person knows he's being watched and could be held solely accountable f—_

_All right, you've made your point. Several times over. I'm not asking you to overdose. Anyway, we're here._

Jonathan blinked. They were, in fact, standing in front of the door to the master bedroom. How long they'd been there was anyone's guess. He really needed to do something about this zoning out problem. Still bewildered at just what his other half hoped to accomplish, he let Scarecrow be the one to open the door.

Scarecrow did not, as the door was locked.

"Since when does he lock his door?" He was surprised enough to speak aloud. It had never been locked before, when he'd been following Batman from room to room and lying on his bed reading Edgar Allen Poe while the man was out.

Maybe this was the Bat's way of telling him that all the stalking wasn't appreciated.

"He doesn't lock it," said a voice from behind him, one that was unmistakably stern and British. "I did."

Jonathan turned around to find the butler standing in the hallway, Scarecrow speaking before he could come up with some suitably subtle yet rude remark. "Do you just obsessively follow me?"

"When there's nothing else to do? Yes."

_Do people in the United Kingdom all have impeccable snark, or is that just him? _"I'd think you'd always be busy, considering your employer. That has to mean a great deal of strain on you, hasn't it?" If he could even feel strain. Jonathan had seen him three times that he could recall, and each of the three had him appearing out of nowhere at the least opportune moment. One had been in the middle of the night as well, making Jonathan question if he actually slept, or constantly wandered, making lives miserable all the while.

The butler stared at him for a fraction of a second too long, long enough to make Jonathan even more uncomfortable. "All it means is that I cover the things he forgets. Such as restricting a madman's access to his personal effects."

"And yet it took you until now to think of locking the door. I'm beginning to see where he gets his perpetual cluelessness."

Mocking the butler, as Jonathan realized the second after he'd done it, was not a good idea. The look in the man's eyes could bring lesser criminal masterminds to tears. And the most frightening thing was that he didn't appear to be more than mildly angry. Not yet. "Dr. Crane, I believe you'll come to find that Master Wayne and I have a rather different style of going about things. You recall all the threats he made regarding the things he could do to keep you silent, I'm sure?"

He nodded, keeping his mouth tightly closed in case Scarecrow decided to smart off and have them both eviscerated.

"Well, the difference between Master Wayne and myself is that I'd actually do them." He didn't add "Do I make myself clear?", but the look his face said it well enough to make the words unnecessary.

"You're the one who raised him?" Scarecrow asked, overriding Jonathan's attempts to bite their tongue and remain silent. He could feel his other half's anger, as well as his own overwhelming fear that this would end with himself hanged, drawn, and quartered or worse.

"I am." He looked as if he was daring his master's captive to continue. That, and scrutinizing in a way that Jonathan didn't like at all.

"I can see why he turned out so well."

The butler gave him a look that would have made lesser criminal masterminds _faint, _right as Jonathan's mind figured out the reason for the prying gaze. _He can tell the difference._

Scarecrow looked different from Jonathan. Not in a way that a casual observer—or Arkham psychiatrist—would pick up on, but there were differences if one really watched. Jonathan's stances and movements tended to be rigid, whereas Scarecrow's were more relaxed. Jonathan's voice was, in many cases, just barely higher, as he was the one who experienced the more high-strung emotions on a fairly regular basis. Scarecrow was blunt, and Jonathan was eloquent. And a thousand other little differences like that. Most people overlooked them.

Obviously, the butler was not most people.

He couldn't know the extent of the split, of course, but he noticed _something, _and even that was too much of a risk. Jonathan fled back down the stairs before Scarecrow could say anything else, grateful that the butler didn't trip him on the way down, and retreated to one of the sitting rooms, heart still pounding. He sat there for hours, awaiting Batman's return. Just why he was awaiting it, he wasn't sure, but until he had time to fully relax, it was the only thought that kept him from absolute panic.

* * *

AN: Gilgamesh and Enkidu are characters in the narrative poem _The Epic of Gilgamesh._

In Wichita, Kansas, 2007, a woman named LaShanda Calloway was fatally stabbed in a convenience store. While she was bleeding to death, five other shoppers stepped over her without assisting, calling 911, or alerting the staff. One did stop, however, to take a picture of ther with a camera phone.

The bystander experiment tests whether or not a person will take action to help someone, first when the subject is alone, and then with others. The experiment found that when people are in a group, they're less likely to help as they assume others will take care of it. That and other depressing experiments (the worst of all being the Milgram) can be read about here: www. cracked. com/ article_16239_5-psychological-experiments-that-prove-humanity-doomed. html


	37. What You Need

AN: Massive apologies for the delay on this one. It's been a hectic past few days. My sister came to visit before moving into her apartment, and I had to help her move and dismantle furniture to take there. Yesterday was quite possibly the strangest day I've ever had (involving counterfeit bills and meth addicts; for full details see here: s15. zetaboards. com/ carrotstick/ topic/ 6714808/ 1) and today I got dragged out of my house to go buy a washing machine for no good reason whatsoever.

Anyway, thanks for all of the reviews!

* * *

_In the name of all that is good and pure in this world, _please _let me do the speaking to others from now on._

Jonathan could tell, even before Scarecrow responded, that the plea had fallen on deaf ears. That was the problem with having another half. Scarecrow was everything he could want in a companion, dominant in situations where Jonathan would be timid, street smart and cunning in places where Jonathan would be clueless. However, being an embodiment of everything Jonathan was not had the unfortunate side effects of power struggles and constant bickering.

And neither of them seemed to be particularly gifted in common sense.

_So, not only do you have default control of the body, but now you want sole contact with the outside world?_

Jonathan felt his teeth grind involuntary. That happened so often during their disagreements that he was honestly surprised to have any tooth enamel left. _If it keeps suspicion away from us? Absolutely._

_Jonathan, I hate to break it to you—_his tone implied that he didn't hate it at all—_but the way you converse is hardly inconspicuous._

It was a bad sign when his other half—a part of _himself_—was on the verge of giving him migraines. All right, so the thing from the previous night when he'd accidentally spoken his responses to Scarecrow out loud hadn't exactly been his shining moment, but that was entirely Scarecrow's fault for yelling at him to begin with. Besides, he hadn't been the one to keep randomly taking control and attracting the butler's attention. And now that he wasn't suffering from the "can't shut up" medication side effect, he was able to hold perfectly normal conversations.

Well, not perfectly normal, as he'd always been awkward around others, but that was only because everyone else was an idiot.

And he didn't have the habit of making every other statement inflammatory or offensive. _I could say the same to you._

_I'm blunt, not stupid._

Damn Scarecrow and his habit of making his retorts as nonchalant as possible. No matter what the argument was, unless it was deadly serious, his other half always made it seem like casual conversation that couldn't mean less to him. It was the sort of insouciance he both loved and detested. _What are you trying to imply?_

_That while you're the most book smart person I've ever shared a body with—_

_Oh, what an accomplishment that is._

_Are you going to let me finish? Brilliant as you are, you still have no sense of when to shut up._

_Neither do you. _And he didn't. While anything either of them said was likely to earn a beating from Arkham's guards or other inmates, it was Scarecrow's comments that got them sedated or put in solitary. Scarecrow was the one who'd lost his temper when Harley first broke the Joker out of Arkham, and his comments to Leland then—along with the entire trying to overturn the desk on top her issue—had earned them a week of sedation unto a vegetative state.

_Correction. I bait people. They get angry, and I might get hit, but piss them off enough and they forget what they were thinking about in the first place. Whereas you end up giving out more and more information that only sends the gears in their heads spinning._

_I'd rather have suspicious people than a broken jaw._

_Would you?_ Scarecrow's casual manner disappeared instantaneously, his emotions suddenly cold.

_I—_

_Because if other people knew about me, they would think you're insane. Even more insane than they already do. Even _the Joker _thinks I'm some sort of hallucination. They would try to get rid of me. Is that what you want?_

_Of course not. _The change in mood was abrupt enough to make him dizzy. It wasn't anger in Scarecrow's voice. At least, not entirely. There was also fear. He couldn't recall ever hearing that from Scarecrow before, not without a threat to Jonathan's own wellbeing to act as the catalyst. _I—how can you even ask that?_

And just as rapidly, that cold feeling, as if he'd jumped into ice water, was gone. At least, for the most part. _Breathe, Jonathan. It was a rhetorical question._

_It didn't feel rhetorical._

Scarecrow didn't respond to that. _My point is, that's what they'd try to do. If they found out. That, or drug me into silence._

He was right, unfortunately. Even in Arkham, hearing voices was never a good sign and the relationship they shared would be torn to shreds in the name of healing. And without Scarecrow, as this period of captivity had proved, he simply could not function. _Be that as it may, Batman has dealt with me enough to know that I'm not always irreverent. If I act that way on a permanent basis, he'll know something's wrong and he'll dig deeper regardless. It's his nature._

A sigh. It belonged to both of them.

_Well then, what do you propose we do?_

He wrapped an overlong strand of hair around his finger, thinking. _Let who ever speaks first hold the entire conversation? "Mood swings" are easier to overlook when they don't happen midsentence. And only one of us talks to the butler, so he disregards what he saw before as frustration or something._

A long pause as Scarecrow deliberated. _Fine. But if you start jeopardizing us, I reserve the right to cut you off._

_And I reserve that same right if you put us in danger._

_Fine._

Jonathan stopped winding his hair and considered just how long this arrangement was likely to last. Optimistically, at least two conversations. Realistically, half a second.

_Scarecrow?_

_Yes?_

Lack of communication between them had led to desertion, the last time, so it was only logical to assume that they needed to be completely open with each other now. However, what was logical in theory was often outright suicidal in practice, and admitting that he felt some strange longing for Batman's company was certainly no exception. So he shook his head, stayed silent.

The Bat chose that moment to return home.

* * *

Jonathan Crane had poisoned him. He'd set him on fire, provided the drug that tore the Narrows apart, and tried poisoning him again. He'd slammed Batman into the column of a parking garage, which could have been deadly, if not for the body armor. In their various encounters, he'd been poisoned, bitten, kicked, hit, slapped, bludgeoned, and a thousand other things Bruce had probably forgotten.

So why was it, out of all the transgression to hold against him, it was Jonathan following him around like an attention-starved housecat that had the biggest impact? The toxin hadn't managed to drive him fully mad, but if he came home one more time to the sight of his enemy waiting on the nearest piece of furniture with the air of an anxious child, that might well be enough to push him over the edge.

It was like Chinese water torture. Not painful, or even particularly frightening if one didn't think too hard about it, but persistent and grating enough to cause irreparable damage. If he let it go that far. He wasn't about to. "Jonathan."

Jonathan looked up. Brows knit and eyes darting ever so slightly, he looked on the verge of speaking. Much to Bruce's displeasure, however, he remained silent.

The elective mutism was another thing slowly but surely pushing him into the mouth of madness. Jonathan was intelligent, to say the least, and articulate when he wasn't ranting in a panic or speaking to things that didn't exist. He didn't converse well with Bruce, true, but given Bruce's alter ego, that was to be expected. And if he'd functioned as Arkham's administrator, he had to be able to communicate well, unless the staff there was so used to unresponsiveness in their patients that they didn't notice it in their employees. Regardless of how he'd gotten by, someone so brilliant ought to realize that refusing to speak only served to draw out problems which could have otherwise been solved immediately, and added even more tension to their living arrangements.

There was madness to be taken into account, of course, but that didn't make it any less frustrating.

Bruce forced himself to keep on smiling, as if he didn't have the desire to grab the man and shake him until he started acting like the genius he was. It wasn't Jonathan's fault that he was completely insane, but knowing that didn't make him any easier to interact with. "We need to talk."

Jonathan made a small, noncommittal sound that could have meant anything from "I agree" to "Go to hell." He still wasn't entirely focused on Bruce, eyes darting around as his expression shifted. If this was a sign that the medication had stopped working, then secret be damned, Bruce would be taking him back to Arkham. He couldn't handle that again, no matter how many sedatives or teddy bears he could have at his disposal.

"I know that you hate being asked if you need anything. But that's honestly the only thing I can think of to say at times like this. I'm not trying to annoy you by asking. Really."

"Times like what?" There were the faintest of stammers to his words when he began, but he was finally returning the eye contact. Whether that was good or bad, Bruce couldn't tell, but he chose to view it as a positive development, if only to give himself incentive against giving up at once.

"When you follow me around like a hungry stray." Not the most tactful way of phrasing it, but true.

Jonathan's expression darkened, and his mouth opened slightly before he closed it again, hard. Presumably, he was literally biting his tongue. Wonderful. He was already infuriated.

"I know that this is a horrible situation for you. But the way you deal with things isn't helping. You obviously want something, but you won't say _what _that something is, and I can't figure it out without something to work with. And since you don't hate me, I think it would be easier on everyone involved if we could just talk."

Jonathan didn't answer, eyes tracking from side to side again. He didn't look as if he were in thought. He looked distracted, as though focused on something besides Bruce's words. It was vaguely reminiscent of the look he wore when interacting with hallucinations, and that realization made Bruce's blood run cold. "Jonathan?"

Nothing.

He took hold of the other's shoulders, carefully. "Jonathan? What's wrong?"

"Get _of_—" The tension was suddenly gone from the man, as quickly as it appeared. "Stop it. Please."

"Stop what? Touching you?" His hands faltered, but he didn't let go, not yet. He couldn't ascertain where the man was, mentally, and he wasn't about to give him the chance to run.

"Being…being considerate."

That, he hadn't been expecting. What was it with criminals and their inability to accept kindness? "No. What do you need?"

"I…that—I—" Jonathan cut off abruptly, looking every bit as stunned as Bruce felt when he jolted forward, arms winding around his captor in a painfully tight hug. "This?"


	38. Communicating

AN: Sorry the obscenely long delay! I moved back into college this morning, and the last few days were all spent packing/saying goodbye to people/being completely drained from the first two. I'm going to try to go back to my usual updating schedule now, though it may be somewhat disrupted when classes start back up next week.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"Jonathan?"

"I—shut up." He averted his gaze, though he made no move to let go. Bruce was almost suffocating and the quick and ridiculous thought that this was some sort of inept attempt at cutting of his oxygen supply crossed his mind. "Just…shut up."

It was like the hug from this morning, or the handholding incident from the day prior. Both times, like now, had been abrupt and without warning. At least, any warning that Bruce could discern. Both times, Jonathan had made a point of avoiding discussion about the contact, as he was doing now, and Bruce knew from experience that attempting to talk to him would be an exercise in futility. Even if he was able to get Jonathan to answer, the conversation would last all of five minutes before something inside the man broke and made any further attempts to get through to him impossible. _Déjà vu, _to say the least, and Bruce ought to have admitted defeat and given up before Jonathan had time to start shouting.

"No."

"What?"

It would take less effort to follow the man's advice and shut up. It would be less painful. There was a strong possibility that Jonathan would be easier to deal with if he was allowed to have mood swings uninterrupted. At the very least, he couldn't be any worse than when Bruce tried to intervene. All the odds pointed to failure, and he'd be doing himself a favor just to sit there and let himself be held until Jonathan decided that he hated to be touched.

But there was no way he was going to let that happen.

"No. We need to talk."

It was selfishness making him push forward, and he'd freely admit it. It would be easier to shut up and let Jonathan follow whatever compulsion he was acting on at the moment, but he refused to do it. He'd thought being followed was exhausting, but the last day had proved the switches between need and hatred to be a hundred times worse. Not to say that there wasn't concern as well—Jonathan was giving every indication that there was something seriously wrong with him, even more than usual—but at the moment, it was buried under his own frustration. The hardest part about being a selfless hero was the "selfless" bit.

"I don't want to talk." His voice gave every indication that he'd meant to sound cold and flippant, but came out petulant instead.

"I know that. We're talking." It wasn't a choice, not anymore. There was a time to be patient and calm and there was a time to be calm and demanding. And this was the latter.

"No." He was trying for cold again. He sounded almost pained this time.

_Fine. _He wasn't going to argue. He was simply going to remove the option of staying silent. "Are you happy?"

Jonathan finally raised his head, thankfully looking more lost and guarded than outright angry. "What?"

"Are you happy like this?"

Finally, Jonathan's grip loosened and Bruce was able to fully breathe again. He didn't answer, unwinding one arm completely and rubbing at his temple, hard, as if that would block out the offending question. Very gently, Bruce worked his own hand free and took Jonathan's wrist, pulling his arm done. "Jonathan."

The former doctor looked up at him, expression equal parts aggrieved and nervous. "No. I'm not."

"All right. Thank you. Neither am I."

Jonathan let go completely, shrugged. "That's life."

"It doesn't have to be. And I would prefer that it isn't. Wouldn't you?"

He had his head in his hands again, silent.

"Jonathan."

"What?"

He held in a sigh—something he'd done so often as of late that he was surprised his lungs hadn't ruptured—and took Jonathan's wrists a second time, keeping his hold so the other couldn't raise his arms again. "Do you want to be unhappy?"

"No."

"Neither do I. And seeing as how every problem we have that isn't based around an escape attempt is caused by the fact that I have no idea what's going on in your head, we need to be able to talk to each other."

Jonathan tried tugging his hands free and, upon being unable, leaned forward until his head was practically against his knees, like a woman with horrible stomach cramps. "I don't—"

"I know you don't want to. But this isn't helping whatever's making you act this way."

Jonathan didn't respond, eyes shut. Bruce chose to take that as an acknowledgement of his words, one that signified neither agreement nor disagreement.

"I don't know what you want. You act like you don't want to be near me, but then you hold onto me or ask me to sit next to you. And as soon as I do, you get angry. What do you want, Jonathan? If you want me to stay away from you, I will. But I can't if I have no idea what you need."

There was a moment of silence, one stretching on for so long that Bruce nearly repeated the question, thinking Jonathan hadn't heard it. Whatever was going on inside the man's head, it was either loud or extremely distracting. He was about to repeat himself when Jonathan did answer, so faintly he had to lean in to make out the words. "I don't know."

It was a start, even if they'd only moved forward about half an inch from where they'd begun. "Okay. Does holding onto me like this help you at all?"

His fingers twitched as he tried to pull free again. "I…I think—yes?"

"So it helps?"

He nodded, slowly. He'd gone pale, and Bruce loosened his grip, to no visible change.

"All right. Then why do you get upset every time we have physical contact?"

"I don't want to talk," Jonathan muttered, head now entirely against his knees. "Please. I don't want—"

"I know. But we have to talk, so you might as well get it over with now."

"We don't have to talk."

"Yes, we do."

Jonathan raised his head enough to shake it. "It _hurts._"

He loosened his grip again, even though he knew it was nowhere near tight enough to inflict pain. "I'm not hurting you. Why do you panic like this every time I try to talk to you?"

"Let go."

"Answer the question."

"_Let go_!"

As softly as he possibly could, he used his hold on Jonathan's wrists to make him sit up, though he couldn't force the man into eye contact. "If you talk to me, I'll let go and you can leave the room or lie down or whatever you want. But if you don't talk to me, we'll have to sit here until you do."

Jonathan jerked his hands free before Bruce could stop him, bringing them up to cover his face and rubbing, hard, on his forehead. He stayed silent, aside from a quiet, pained moan.

Against all his better efforts, Bruce felt his patience snap. "You're a genius. You should be smart enough to realize that you're only making things harder on yourself."

Jonathan muttered something completely unintelligible, both due to his volume and his hands obscuring his mouth.

He softened, against his better judgment. Most of the things he did around this man seemed to be against his better judgment. That didn't bode well, but there was no time to reflect on that now. "Sorry? I couldn't hear you."

"I don't _know._" Before Bruce could ask for clarification on what he was referring to, he went on, without looking up. "I don't know why, all right? You're terrifying and violent and rich and everything I hate and you ruined my life but you're not being horrible and I can't figure out what your motive is but you have to have one because there's no reason for you to be nice to me and I don't understand you but for some reason it makes me calm down when I'm next to you and I miss you when you're not and my head really, really hurts and you won't leave me alone and I also don't want you to go but I don't know _why_." The break in his voice on the final word indicated he was crying, but Bruce couldn't be sure.

He really had a terrible habit of pushing people into breakdowns. Once this mess was over, he ought to devote his free time to breaking that trend.

"Jonathan, it's all right."

"You and I have wildly different definitions of "all right."" Jonathan lowered his hands, revealing that he hadn't been crying after all. That was a good sign, if a miniscule one. Earlier in the week, this would have had him sobbing. "I'm losing my mind, Batman. Nothing about that is all right."

_As if you hadn't already lost it. _"You're not." He hoped he sounded reassuring as opposed to exasperated. "You're just conflicted. That's normal."

Jonathan scoffed, looking for a moment less the frazzled captive he'd been for the past few weeks and more like the brilliant if psychotic ex-psychiatrist he was under less remarkable circumstances. "And since when do you know anything about normal?"

"I've been passing as it for years now. So I'd say I know something."

"Drunken billionaire playboys are hardly what I'd classify as normal."

"Neither are toxin-wielding asylum escapees."

Jonathan's mouth twitched ever so slightly. Bruce couldn't be sure if it was in anger or amusement. "This is not normal."

"Well, nothing about your situation is normal, so it's par for the course." Jonathan was still pale, eye wide, and Bruce wondered if taking his hand would be at all relieving. He said that he enjoyed the contact, but it was that same contact that led to the sort of situation they found themselves in now.

There was also the small matter that touching Jonathan in that manner was beyond uncomfortable.

It shouldn't have. After holding the man while he was sobbing hysterically for weeks on end, and being slept on or hugged on more than one occasion, touching his hand ought to be nothing. But it was different than the other times. Jonathan was aware of his actions now, and grounded if not calm, which made it less "humoring the crazy person" and more "intimately touching an enemy." But there was something beyond that, an odd feeling it created that Bruce couldn't place. Holding hands was something friends did, not an action shared between two people who had poisoned and beaten each other, and even if it helped, it was still disconcerting.

He placed his hand on Jonathan's shoulder instead. He twitched, but didn't move away, rubbing his temples again. "I don't like this."

"I know." Bruce didn't add that he didn't like it either. There was no point in adding to the man's conflict. "And I'll get you back to Arkham as soon as I get this mess sorted out, all right?"

He twitched again. "And what are we supposed to do until that point?"

It occurred to Bruce that "I have no idea" as an answer would not go over well. It also occurred to him that he did not have an answer. Jonathan had become attached, much as he seemed to dislike it, and Bruce had no idea how to undo that need without causing more damage or creating another security blanket. He wasn't even sure if the attachment was to himself, or only the act of being touched. The only thing he was sure of was his own conflict, between his discomfort and his desire to help.

"Just…do what makes you feel secure," he said, after a long pause. "I won't—I'll try not to bother you about it, okay?"

Jonathan lowered his hands. He looked incredulous, then cautious. But when he spoke, it was in agreement. "All right."

"Good. And I'll get you back as soon as I can." He expected a remark about how Arkham was every bit as bad as Wayne Manor, but none came. "Did you need an aspirin?"

He shook his head. Some of the color had come back to his face, but only just. "I want to lie down."

"In here?"

Another shake of the head. "I think I want to be alone."

"Do you need me to walk with you?"

A long pause, and a nod. Jonathan stood, still shaky and pale, but looking less despondent than he had in a while. Bruce couldn't tell if the conversation had given him relief or if he was tapping into a previously unseen inner resolve.

Bruce stood as well, without closing the space between him. It seemed better, under the circumstances, to let Jonathan decide how closely toward him to walk.

Jonathan surprised him by taking the lead, though he'd glance over his shoulder every so often, and would, if he found he'd moved up a great deal, slow until Bruce was directly behind him again.


	39. Distress

AN: The costume photos, along with the Joker doll photos, are online again. Here's the new link: s15. zetaboards. com/ carrotstick/ single/ ?p=8015757&t=6706911 Oh, and I forgot to get a picture of this, but you know how an ordinary Raggedy Ann doll has the heart reading "I Love You"? The Joker doll has a heart reading "I Love Batsy."

Hey, a chapter one day after another. I haven't done that for a while now.

One a completely unrelated anecdote, you know you're an honors college kid when you only know your ID number because "the last four digits are the same as the identification number for the Starship Enterprise." I'm such a nerd, but I'm proud.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan didn't have a descriptor for the pain he was in.

Considering how used to pain he was, that was saying something. It wasn't as if he'd never suffered before. Firing a nail gun through his own hand was probably the worst thing he'd ever endured—in physical pain, at least—but even without that, he'd had more than his fair share of agonies. The beatings from his great-grandmother, the Joker, and Batman, his various withdrawals, and all the other injuries he'd inflicted on himself didn't even come close. Not even the one hangover he'd had—which had been awful enough to make him swear off alcohol forever—had been this godawful.

The only thing that compared was the agony he'd felt when Scarecrow left.

And fighting with his other half, it seemed, was just as bad as being without him. Well, technically, it hadn't been a fight. It had been exactly like their argument when Scarecrow had woken to find Jonathan hugging Batman; namely, Scarecrow shouting while Jonathan tried to block out the noise and focus on what the Bat was saying, so as not to arouse suspicion. And being shouted at so loudly, when the noise came from inside his mind without any outside interference to dampen it, could be described as nothing but torture. Torture coming from his other half, no less, the one person who ought to be unconditionally kind.

Though to be fair, it was really Jonathan's fault for being an idiot. Both for hugging Batman and for refusing to let Scarecrow take control afterwards. Jonathan, fearing that another abrupt change in temperament would be enough to bring the Bat up to the same speed as his butler, had blocked Scarecrow's attempts to take over, draining him of energy and making him unable to do much more than sit there and answer the questions thrown at him. He wasn't even able to stop from showing outward signs of pain, though he'd only let one response intended for Scarecrow slip.

Even that was too much, considering that one of Batman's nicknames was "World's Greatest Detective." Not that his detecting skills had been particularly attuned as of late, but Jonathan hadn't had this problem hiding his other half until yesterday.

Jonathan wasn't able to block Scarecrow out completely, as the other had done to him. At least, he assumed he wasn't able to; he hadn't tried and he had no desire to, no matter how great the urge to keep Scarecrow hidden. And keeping him from taking over wasn't like temporarily closing their mental connection. That was effortless, like turning a light switch on and off. Fighting for control, on the other hand, was an actual fight. And a draining one.

The struggle would have been bad enough without Batman's questions. But it was Scarecrow's shouting that turned it into pure torture. All _what are you doing, you little idiot _or _you promised you'd do what I wanted, liar _or _this is exactly what the Joker did to you, do you _like _abuse to let it happen a second time_ and on and on. After a point it had all run together, but it had never stopped hurting, possibly because it was all true.

He couldn't tell which was worse: the physical pain from the noise, or the emotional pain from the entire ordeal. Both were hell.

Scarecrow wasn't talking anymore. The link between them was closed, though thankfully he could still feel the other's presence. Hopefully it was a temporary absence and Scarecrow would open the link again once he'd calmed down. Hopefully.

_Why did I do it?_

The hug, he understood. At least partly. The hug fulfilled the need for contact. Even if he'd yet to figure out why he had that need, he did understand the motivation. But that was no reason to start talking. He never spoke to someone trying to figure him out. Never. It was infuriating, having someone try to analyze him, acting as if he had any insight into Jonathan's mind. He should have let Scarecrow take over. He might have acted calm, given the discussion earlier about avoiding conspicuous behaviors. At the very least, he should have stayed silent.

But he hadn't, and for the life of him he couldn't figure out why.

He did not _talk _to people. Even before they started analyzing him, he'd never been conversational, and had avoided discussion whenever possible, no matter how minor. He'd been taught at a young age that the people in his life didn't want to hear him speak, aside from Scarecrow, and he supposed that had stayed with him even after he'd left Georgia. He didn't talk. Not to Joan Leland or the nurses or the rest of the Arkham staff—aside from the all too frequent moments when he parted ways with common sense and said something insulting—or any of the other inmates, aside from the other costumed criminals.

He often wondered if his willingness to speak to them—as well as the unexpected friendship they shared—existed simply because they were all in the same boat. Whatever the reason, he hadn't wanted to talk to them at first either, and wouldn't have if Isley hadn't decided that he needed friends and refused to leave him alone until he spoke back. He hadn't wanted to talk to Harley either, and wouldn't have if the Joker hadn't threatened him into it.

_Harley._

Remembering her made him tense. He missed her, as he always did when they were separated for a long stretch of time. She'd been the first person he'd ever missed, even before the rest of the criminals, whom he'd known first, probably because she'd been the first person in Arkham that he'd regarded as a friend. She'd been the one to teach him what friendship was, and had given it unconditionally, even after the Joker had twisted her mind.

She was also the first person whom he'd wanted physical contact with.

Harley had been the one to touch him first, putting her hand on his to keep him from having a panic attack. At the time it had startled him, but he'd had to admit that it wasn't entirely unpleasant. The first time he'd initiated contact with her, it had been to calm her down, when the Joker had left. That time, when he'd hugged her, he'd found it invasive, suffocating, and altogether uncomfortable. But the second time he'd hugged her of his own volition, it hadn't been for her benefit. It was after Harley had begun her criminal career, when he'd been reunited with her. That hug had been for his own security, something he'd needed. Whether he needed it to assure himself of her presence or because he'd missed her, he wasn't sure, but it had been out of need.

He'd needed physical contact with the Joker as well, but that had been out of desire. The contact with his other friends, after he'd hugged Harley, had been out of similar needs, usually reassurance. And while the strange longing he got around Batman wasn't exactly like what he'd felt when he hugged Harley the second time, it was the closest thing he could think of. He'd hugged her partly because he'd been worried for her, but also because he needed reassurance that she was really there. It hadn't been a need that anyone could have fulfilled by hugging back. He had needed _Harley._

And that need felt very similar to the one he'd felt before hugging Batman.

Which would indicate that he needed Batman's presence to reassure him. Considering that the Bat had been the one to care for him while he was insane, that wasn't too far-fetched of an idea, but it was the principle of the thing.

Did that make him _friends _with Batman?

* * *

Alfred was either a saint or telepathic, because when Bruce wandered into the kitchen, there was a pot of coffee sitting in the maker, and a large mug of it sitting at Bruce's usual spot. Alfred was seated in his regular chair, glancing through the newspaper. "It should still be hot."

"How," Bruce asked, slumping into the seat, "would this place run without you?" It only occurred to him after he'd taken the first sip that he ought to have got the creamer from the cabinet before he sat down. That, and a few aspirin.

"It wouldn't." He turned a page without bothering to look up.

Bruce considered getting up, before deciding that taking the coffee black would be better than expending the energy to stand up and change it. "This is going to be the death of me, Alfred."

From behind the paper, Alfred scoffed. "Master Wayne, if staying out until the early morning, sleeping for two hours, and then going to work hasn't killed you yet, I doubt having an unwanted houseguest will." He turned the page again, scanned it.

"Considering that said houseguest is a mad scientist following me like a lost puppy? It might."

"If you survived being trapped in the manor with a burning log on top of you, I have the utmost faith that can make it through this, sir." He folded the newspaper and placed it on the table, meeting Bruce's eyes for the first time. "You need to take a night off."

"Don't have the time." Off Alfred's look, he added, "I'm no good to Gotham sitting at home."

"You're no good to Gotham dead from exhaustion, either. Isn't your friend Ms. Vreeland having an environmental fundraiser this week? You should go. Get yourself away from the madness."

He took a particularly large sip and managed to burn his tongue. "I think my time is better spent elsewhere, Alfred."

Alfred fixed him with a look that was both entirely grave and entirely fake. "Are you suggesting that Wayne Enterprises is not concerned with climate change?"

"I'll make a donation."

"When was the last time you went out with a woman?"

For a moment, Bruce only stared—was his own butler telling him to get laid?—before he went on. "Or out at all, socially?"

He had to think about it. That wasn't a good sign. "Sunday?" Too long, even with the added stress. It was only a matter of time before the gossip columns noticed, if they hadn't already. Another slip on his part; he'd stopped checking those sections of the paper.

"Take a break." It wasn't a request.

"Fine. When is it?"

"Saturday."

Bruce took another drink, the bitterness somewhat diminished by the burn. So far, there was no discernable effect on his fatigue. He really ought to start injecting caffeine into his bloodstream. Unhealthy, yes, but faster. "I think you underestimate the effect this man is having."

"Do you?" Alfred's expression was truly serious now. "Because I'd say it's the other way around."

He blinked, mental processes seeming slowed. "What?"

"The medication he's on? It doesn't appear to be working."

Bruce sat up straighter in his chair. "What makes you say that?"

"Have you ever watched his eyes when he speaks, Master Wayne?"

So Jonathan had had a run in with Alfred. Bruce considered it. Crane's eyes…they were blue and wide and disconcertingly innocent-looking, considering the mind behind them. "What about them?"

"They change. Or, the look in them does. Along with the mood swings. His entire body language, the way he reacts, it all alters."

Wonderful. That would signify that he was hallucinating again, though at a lesser level. But then, helpless as he'd been acting, Jonathan Crane was a disturbed genius. It was possible that he was in complete control of himself, and this was all an act. "Do you think he's aware of it?"

"He didn't seem to be at first. But then he caught me giving him an odd look and ran off."

Assuming that he wasn't faking, that sounded normal for Jonathan; hiding his illness until it was too late. And it served to explain the all the clinging. He was surprised to feel his exasperation fade entirely, with nothing but pity in its place. So Jonathan Crane had slipped back into madness.

Considering that he was a criminal, why did he so often seem to be the damsel in distress?

* * *

AN: Veronica Vreeland is one of Bruce's friends from _Batman: The Animated Series. _She dated him for a while, and remained friends after that fell through. She spends most of her time doing various fundraisers and charities events, and also gets kidnapped or otherwise involved with villains a lot.


	40. Friends?

AN: And another update a day after one. It's ironic that last year, this would have been standard practice for me, but the summer completely killed my usual updating schedule. Why do I seem to have more time at college than at home? At this rate, we might see a return to that time over the winter holidays where I went insane and updated ALWAF three times in one day.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

There were a number of things in the world that Bruce Wayne did not want. All the negative attention the press showered on him, for example, necessary as it was to maintain the illusion, or the legion of woman attracted to him solely because he had wealth, the type he found himself spending time with all too often. The vulnerabilities that were the price of the lighter body armor, and the contempt much of Gotham still felt for the Batman. All unwanted, and all much more unpleasant than going to check up on Jonathan Crane to see if he was losing his mind again.

In theory, anyway. In practice, Bruce knew that getting Jonathan to converse with him was like pulling teeth and he would have given anything not to have to do it, much as it needed to be done. He'd have been perfectly willing to sit at the kitchen table, stalling for another half hour or so, if it wasn't for Alfred's increasingly disapproving look boring into him.

So he found himself in the hallway to the guest bedroom, a bottle of water in one hand and a bottle of aspirin in the other. Peace offerings, of a sort. Which, in all likelihood, had a better chance of turning into makeshift weapons. Particularly if the doctor had gone mad again.

Much as Bruce hated people with an entitlement complex—which he rather unfortunately ran into every time he brushed elbows with the rest of the Gotham elite—he couldn't help but feel this wasn't something he should have to deal with. He wasn't a psychiatrist. The extent of his medical knowledge—at least, the knowledge that he could put to practice—consisted of first aid, sedation, and little else. He was working with an illegally obtained prescription, one based on medical file created by doctors who'd had no luck in curing or even restraining their patient. Bruce was a college dropout. He did not need to be in charge of medicating mad scientists.

_Especially when I never asked for that scientist to be here in the first place._

Really, this all came back to the Joker's manipulations. Not that it was an excuse—Bruce should have been better prepared for such a scenario, and he ought to have kept a closer watch on the doctor's medication—but if the Joker hadn't insisted on what, in his demented mind, probably constituted as a sleepover, none of this would have happened. Jonathan Crane would be back in Arkham, and Bruce would be getting a good night's sleep. His version of it, at any rate.

True, communications had improved between them in the last conversation and Jonathan had seemed almost comfortable with his presence, but getting him to speak had still tried Bruce's patience, and the relaxation was probably due to letting Jonathan set the boundaries. Something he couldn't do now, as he highly doubted that Jonathan would be comfortable with discussing his sanity or lack thereof. That was a sore spot for him, for obvious reasons.

_Pull yourself together, _he commanded himself, straightening. This was ridiculous. He was the Batman, after all. He was the one to strike fear deep in the hearts of criminals, the one who made them think twice about the illicit activities they set out to conduct. Before the Joker had come along and the fiasco with Harvey Dent had dealt a heavy blow to his standing in the city and his connection with the GPD—a blow he still had yet to fully recover from—crime rates had dropped in the city. The mob had weakened, and for the first time since it gained power in the economic crisis, showed signs of collapsing. He'd suffered a setback, but the potential was there. He had led the crusade that caused more change in Gotham than the average citizen would have thought possible. He was the dramatic example that had shaken the city.

And even without all that, he was Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne, rich enough to buy the entire city should he so desire, and powerful enough that the Gotham socialites didn't dare exclude him despite his reputation as a mindless, drunken playboy. Not that the younger generation of the elite were much better, for the most part, but there were those old enough to know better who still fell over themselves to get on his good side. Much as he tried to avoid exploiting his wealth for selfish gains, the fact remained that the carpet he was walking on now had cost more than some people's monthly rent, and there was no denying that much money gave power, deserved or not. Bruce Wayne, like Batman, should not be intimidated by the thought of struggling to converse with a madman.

Bruce Wayne, however, felt the doubt that Batman wouldn't allow himself to feel, and the prospect did intimidate him. There was something about Jonathan Crane that managed to strip his sense of stability, though not as badly as the Joker did. He was so absolutely mad, even with the hallucinations controlled, but unlike the clown, his madness took a predictable form. A pattern of thinking that was traceable, even with its distorted logic. That should have made him easy to understand and control, but he was brilliant through the madness, and grounded even though he was totally gone. The mix of insanity and genius managed to be totally disconcerting, even when Bruce understood what was going through the man's mind, and it put him on edge.

Jonathan was lying on the bed just as Bruce had left him, but he sat up as his captor entered the room, brows slanted in thought. He looked troubled by something, which was hardly a good sign, but Bruce decided he should try and stay on the doctor's good side before he started interrogating and held out the aspirin. "Do you wa—"

"Are we friends?" Jonathan asked abruptly, his expression still thoughtful, troubled, and now thoroughly confused.

* * *

"What?"

Batman was staring at him as if he was a complete lunatic, and for once, Jonathan couldn't begrudge him for that. It was a question only a madman would ask, "Are we friends?" to someone who'd poisoned him, beaten him, and locked him up, the latter two on more than one occasion. It was a question to which the answer was a resounding, self-explanatory "NO." In capital, bolded, flashing neon letters.

So Jonathan had thought, in any case. Now, he wasn't entirely sure.

"Are we friends?" Why was he repeating it? He hadn't meant to do that. He'd fully intended to keep his mouth shut and never speak of this incident again. It would have improved his quality of life to drop it. He could feel Scarecrow's anger growing again, though the mental link stayed shut. That was probably for the best.

Jonathan realized he'd thought of a loss of communication with his other half as "for the best" and very nearly vomited on Batman's shoes.

It was official: he had no inner scrutiny. His mind completely and utterly lacked the filter others had that warned them when they were about to say something moronic or offensive, and caught them in their tracks before they could make fools of themselves. He'd either been born without that sense, or lost it at some point during his life. The brain damage the toxin had inflicted seemed like a prime catalyst, but he'd been getting himself into trouble by running his mouth long before that. Perhaps his great-grandmother had landed a particularly forceful blow to the right part of his skull with her cane at some point. Or maybe his mind had developed too quickly to include it, or expended too much space on intellect to be bothered with inner scrutiny.

Whatever the reason, he clearly lacked it. That explained a great deal of his life.

He made the mistake of raising his head to meet the Bats' eyes. The other man's look was as confused as his must be, but also searching, the way one might look at a sample of something particularly odd under a microscope. It made him uncomfortable and he averted his gaze at once, feeling himself blush.

"I…what brought that about?"

"No idea," he muttered, burying his face in his hands. He couldn't remember the last time he'd got himself into this awkward of a conversation and he wanted nothing more than to disappear. Honestly. "Are we friends?" like a small child talking with a new babysitter. Christ. What was this place _doing _to him? He was supposed to cause fear, not uncomfortable silences. Thankfully, Scarecrow was still silent. Not that that was a good sign, but if he'd started shouting, Jonathan wasn't sure he'd be able to keep from crying and humiliating himself. Again.

There were hands on his wrists again, gentle despite their owner's obvious strength, and warm. His arms were lowered and one hand released his wrist, reaching up to touch his face. It was as soft as the contact with his hand, grazing along his jawbone, had been and he nearly leapt off the bed—Scarecrow had in fact done an odd mental leap Jonathan had never felt before—before the hand tilted upwards slightly, causing him to raise his head with it.

"Something made you say it. What's wrong?"

Batman was still giving him that piercing look and it made him anxious and uncomfortable in a way that was somehow not entirely unpleasant, and this time, Jonathan found himself unable to look away. On the other side of the thin wall separating their minds at the moment, Scarecrow seemed to be having a fit, pacing erratically and aimlessly inside.

"You are," he managed, wishing that the Bat would leave, if only for a moment to sort things out. He hated the slips of the tongue he got around the man, and they were becoming more and more frequent. That didn't bode well. "Or I am. I don't know anymore."

There was pity on Batman's face and Jonathan forced himself to stare over his captor's shoulder to avoid seeing it. "Well, what do you think the problem is?" There was a pause, during which he could almost hear the Bat thinking, followed by a softly asked "Is the medication working?" He sounded hesitant, reluctant to say it, which made no sense because Batman was never unsure of anything, even when he was totally and obviously wrong.

"It's not _that_." He felt his face get redder at the reminder that his hated enemy was also acting as his nurse. "It's _you._ I'd have been perfectly happy to sit here and pretend I was somewhere else for as long as you plan on keeping me captive here, but then you had to act concerned and genuine and I can't figure out if you're doing that because you care or because you want it to make your job easier, but whatever it is, it's the most humane treatment I've had in a long time and I'm going mad trying to figure out your intentions."

Batman's hand was on his again. He needed to stop doing that. It made Jonathan blush all the harder, which was hardly helping his attempts to seem strong-willed and resilient, and something about it was setting Scarecrow on edge. "My intention is to be _nice_," he said, something which couldn't possibly be true, and yet his tone was sincere enough that Jonathan felt himself falling for it. "I don't want you to suffer while you're here. You didn't ask for this any more than I did, and there's no point in taking my frustration out on you."

Said the man who'd hit him twice out of nothing more than frustration for losing the Joker last Halloween. Well, that and attempts to gain information, but still. And yet he as acting so _honest. _If he was a liar, this was a performance worthy of an Academy Award. But then, he did hide his Batman persona so well from the public eye…

"Is it that hard to believe?" Batman asked, apparently reading his thoughts.

"Yes. No. I have no idea, not anymore." He brought his hands to his temples again, massaging. For once, out of an actual tension headache, and not an attempt to relieve the pain Scarecrow inflicted. "You've done terrible things to me, and it's arguable that you've hurt me worse than anyone else in my life, even over the Joker or my—" He cut himself off, steadfastly refusing to get into his past with the Bat of all people. "And you're keeping me here against my will, waiting for an opportunity at blackmail to prevent itself before you send me back to Arkham so the orderlies can go back to their weekly rounds of "let's kick the Scarecrow," but you keep acting as though you have real concern, even though it wouldn't benefit you in any way. And you let me follow you around and gave me books and brought back my clothes and let me hug you, more than once. You didn't just throw me out when I was too raving to pose as a threat to you, and this is exactly what happened with Harley, which would seem to indicate that we're friends, but given our past history that ought to be impossible."

He risked looking up at Batman. Thankfully, the scrutinizing look was gone from the man's expression, replaced by humor, of all things. The pity remained, though. "You don't understand people very well, do you?"

"Really? I had no idea." If his tone got any more biting, it would be acidic. "You can't claim that this is standard fare for yourself either."

"Well, no." He wasn't smirking anymore, thank God. "But I do know that you can be friends with some you previously disliked. It's not impossible."

"So we are friends?" The thought made him feel sick and excited at the same time.

"That depends. Do you want to be?"

He considered it. This was Batman. The man who'd poisoned him, exposed him, driven him mad. Who'd ruined every scheme Jonathan had concocted since, and was holding him against his will. This was Batman, who had held him while he was hallucinating, let himself be stalked, and let the man who'd poisoned him on more than one occasion hug him. This was _Batman._

"I…" He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. "I think—I think I do."


	41. Unwanted Feelings

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Friends.

He'd just agreed to be friends with Jonathan Crane. The Scarecrow. A bad guy. A complete madman who'd had no qualms about setting him on fire and letting him fall several stories out a window. Who'd helped the Joker to create a toxin that contorted faces into grotesque smiles as the victims _laughed _to death. Who'd once resorted to _biting _Batman during a fight, resulting in an injury that would have needed plastic surgery to hide if not for Alfred's brilliance at stitching wounds. A man with no moral objection to forcing dangerous toxins into others, and no remorse after the fact.

And Bruce Wayne, _Batman, _had just agreed to be _friends _with him.

This could not possibly be happening. It had to be some sort of dream, or a hallucination. Maybe Jonathan had gotten his hands on chemicals, against all odds, and drugged Bruce so he could make a break for it. Or maybe he was sick. This could be some sort of warped fever dream. He was probably lying in bed right now, running a dangerously high temperature, an effect of overworking his body. He'd wake up and Alfred would give him a lecture and refuse to let him go out for at least a week. If he was really lucky, everything back to the moment when he brought the Joker and Jonathan into the cave would be a hallucination.

Only none of that was true, ideal as it would be. Because bizarre as the situation was, it had still followed some form of logic. And was more than could be said for his toxin hallucinations.

He glanced over at Jonathan, who looked just as lost as he was feeling over this turn of events. He was avoiding Bruce's gaze, as usual, his own wild eyes focused on the navy comforter beneath him. His face was still flushed, hands wringing the bedspread, and he kept shifting minutely in a way that wasn't quite the shaking Bruce had come to associate with psychosis. It wasn't proof that he was grounded, but it was a good sign. He'd do with what he could, at the moment.

Bruce could only imagine how he looked right now. He imagined it wouldn't be all that different from Jonathan, confused and uncomfortable. "Jonathan?"

"Yes?" Blue eyes met brown and darted away almost instantaneously, his face going a deeper red than Bruce would have thought possible.

He cleared his throat and tried to remember what he'd come in for in the first place. He drew a blank, despite his efforts. The surreal nature of the situation seemed to have wiped it from his mind. He was struggling for anything to say when Jonathan beat him to the punch.

"What does this mean?"

"Huh?"

Head still down, he was staring at a loose thread on the comforter as though it was the most interesting thing he'd ever seen. With the hand closest to Bruce, he gestured, first to himself and then to Bruce. "This. This…friendship thing. What does it mean?"

Bruce stared. He'd never had to define friendship before. Then again, he'd never been friends with a super-criminal before. "Does it have to have a meaning?"

"Yes. My relationship with Harley was based around the doctor and patient dynamic. Enjoying each other's company made things easier. With the Joker…that was manipulation."

Bruce was tempted to ask why he still considered the Joker a friend, if he recognized that. Jonathan went on before he got the chance.

"And as for Nigma, Isley, and Tetch, we cross paths often enough that it only makes sense to be on friendly terms. But you…is this convenience to make our interactions easier, or manipulation on your part, or what?" He bit his lip in thought, gently. "Because it doesn't seem like either of those."

Bruce considered putting his hand on Jonathan's shoulder. He'd said that he liked to be touched, but he kept flinching whenever Bruce did, and he was acting wound up enough already. Adding to that by over-stimulating him hardly seemed wise. "Why does there have to be a purpose?"

"Because." He sounded like a petulant child. It was almost endearing.

"Not everything in life has a reason, you know. Sometimes, things just happen. You can like someone without gaining anything from the relationship. You didn't get anything out of renewing your friendship with the Joker." Well, besides an all-expenses-paid trip to the Batcave, and psychosis to go with it.

"I got a horse," Jonathan muttered, straightening. "Someone has to be gaining something from this, and I don't think it's me."

_I don't think it's me, either. _Communication was less strained between them now, but hardly more illuminating. Jonathan could hardly meet his eyes, sucking the success out of the achievement. Jonathan liked him now, but it hadn't changed much. He couldn't even be sure if it was himself that Jonathan liked, or just a comforting presence. And he had yet to sort out his own feelings on the matter. The past he'd shared with Jonathan Crane had been bitter, bloody, and painful. Yet it was increasingly difficult to hold that against him, after all the insight into how warped the doctor's mind had become, as a result of Bruce's negligence. His utter insanity didn't excuse his crimes, but somehow it softened the blow. Seeing him at his most vulnerable had made him less Scarecrow, and more human.

Bruce wasn't sure that what he felt toward Jonathan could be described as amity, but it certainly wasn't hate. "Well, maybe you shouldn't try to define it right now. Give things time."

Jonathan glanced up, mouth opening to respond, when he met Bruce's eyes and looked away again, silent. Ninety percent of his blood supply seemed to be flooding to his face.

"What?"

"Nothing." He sounded confused, as if he was as taken aback by his erratic behavior as Bruce.

"Does your head hurt?" he asked, remembering the bottle of aspirin he'd placed on the nightstand and the queries he was supposed to be making as to Jonathan's mental state quite suddenly. And to think that he'd come down here trying to do nothing more than assess the situation. Yeah, that had turned out.

Jonathan did meet his eyes this time, less flushed and more wary. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you kept holding your head. I thought you might need these." He held out the aspirin, and Jonathan's look softened.

"No, I don't think that would be—" And then he stopped, eyes moving just barely to the left, his head tilting that direction by a nearly imperceptible amount. He didn't just look like he was thinking. He seemed distracted, as if he was listening to something, and that was not a good sign in the least.

"Jonathan?"

"I'll take it," he said, sitting upright again as he held out his hands. "And—could I be alone, for a while? It's—this is a lot. To take in."

Bruce nodded, watching in silence as he took the pills and washed them down. The last thing he wanted was to leave Jonathan alone, but risking the trust he'd managed to gain wasn't worth it. Something was wrong. Jonathan wasn't one to admit a weakness, no matter how obvious it was, and he was clearly hearing something that didn't exist outside of his mind. Alfred had been right, as always, and need for private time or not, Bruce would have to do something about it soon.

* * *

_Goddamn Batman._ Scarecrow clenched the blankets, trying to keep himself under control as he felt Jonathan's consciousness fading. They said it took the average person seven minutes to fall asleep, and he doubted he had seven minutes. Thank God that Jonathan was open to suggestion, or it could have taken half an hour, and he knew that he didn't have that long. The wait until the Batman left the room had been torture, and the continued delay was pushing it into outright hell.

The aspirin had been a lucky break. Beyond a lucky break. Almost divine intervention. As fate would have it, aspirin had a tranquilizing effect on Jonathan. Not always. It only worked on this prescription. The medication he'd been on during his breakout with Harley and the later escape with the Joker hadn't had that side effect, nor had the one that made him unable to shut up. But the one in between, when he'd reconciled his friendship with the Joker and the one the Batman had brought him, reacted strangely with aspirin for whatever reason, and knocked Jonathan right out. How the nurses had failed to realize and make note of it in their file, Scarecrow wasn't sure, but they must have overlooked it or the Batman would have brought something else.

Jonathan, thankfully, had not overlooked it, and Jonathan, as they'd found in their one session of hypnotherapy, was highly suggestible. He shouldn't be near sleep now, as the pills couldn't be fully digested yet, but he was getting hazier by the second. It was taking every fiber of willpower Scarecrow had in his being to keep the link shut, and keep from taking full control before Jonathan was entirely out. It had been hard enough to keep it hidden when he opened the link to instruct Jonathan to take the aspirin, and harder still to keep from revealing this latest wrench in the works, to Jonathan or the Bat. And despite his best efforts, the blushing and fidgeting had slipped through.

_God_damn _him for this._ The next time Scarecrow came face to face with the Batman, he wanted to be holding something either very heavy or very sharp, and introduce it to the Batman's face, repeatedly.

Jonathan was asking something, sounding almost drugged from fatigue. Scarecrow didn't answer. He didn't even focus on it, knowing there was no way he could respond without revealing far too much. He was probably asking why Scarecrow had wanted him to pass out, something he couldn't think up a convincing lie for in this state and something he obviously couldn't be honest about. So silence was safest.

Besides, he didn't have energy to expend on anything else at the moment.

Jonathan's consciousness took _forever _to fade, disappearing by thin tendrils that stubbornly lingered for as long as they could. He still was on the edge of sleep when Scarecrow's resolve broke and he took control, biting down hard on his tongue to keep from making a sound that would give him away and praying to a god he'd never believed in that Jonathan didn't notice how much tighter his pants had gotten before he was out.

He was going to kill the Batman for this. There was no question about it, not anymore. It had to be done. The method he used would be slow and painful and cause delicious panic, but there was no time to choose how he would do it, because the ache between his legs was getting worse by the second and it refused to be dissuaded by Scarecrow's hatred for the man.

He still wasn't sure how he'd managed to keep this terrible new development from being visible for as long as he did. As a general rule, Scarecrow felt the lust, but their body reacted as well. Mercifully, he'd managed to keep this hidden, even from his other half, but the effort and need had nearly driven him mad. He stood, biting his fingers to stifle a moan as he did, and ran for the bathroom, after a moment's pause to make sure the door really was closed and the Bat wasn't lurking nearby in the hall.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the man—who was beginning to seem more of a demon than any human Scarecrow had ever met, apart from the Joker—had clouded Jonathan's mind into believing that he truly cared, that he was nice underneath it all, now he'd tricked their body, just with a few caresses from his warm, powerful hands that…oh _God._

Scarecrow was fairly sure he tasted blood as he bit down that time, but he was too worked up to be sure. The Batman had to die for this. That, or fuck Scarecrow first, but he'd still have to die immediately after—

He withdrew his fingers from his mouth—they were bloody, if only just—and slapped himself across the face hard enough to make his vision swim. It was going to bruise, and he knew that would be a problem, but he couldn't bring himself to care, because thinking like that was sick and wrong and had to be punished. So what if Bruce Wayne was, going by outward appearance, a sex god? So what if his touches sent jolts of electricity through their body, electricity that only Scarecrow could feel? That was no excuse to fantasize about him.

That was sick, and wrong.

He turned the shower on, full blast, ice cold. He cringed, but there was no way he was solving this problem manually. Loathe as he was to admit it, he wouldn't be able to without thinking of the Bat, and he'd rather die than let that happen when it was preventable. He jumped under the spray of water, biting on his hand again to muffle screams of a different nature, and it was agonizing and shocking and filled his mouth with blood, but at least it put an end to that goddamn need.


	42. Viper

AN: So classes start up tomorrow, and in addition having two work shifts, I also have a night class. I'm not sure if this will impede the writing process, but there's a good chance that it might, so I thought I'd warn you.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Scarecrow sat on the bed, huddled in the blankets he'd refused to let Jonathan sleep under last night. He was shivering, still icy to the touch, despite the fact that he'd gotten out of the shower at least ten minutes ago. Staying in there until his skin had turned bluish, in retrospect, had not been at all wise or healthy, but it had been necessary. The freezing water hadn't just been to shock the arousal out of his system. It had also been a punishment for this weakness, this insanity, this…whatever the hell he could call the desire to have the Batman fuck him into the ground. He'd have stayed in longer if it wasn't for the fear of the temperature waking Jonathan.

The air vent started up again, and Scarecrow tightened the blankets around him. It was a struggle, as his fingers were still numb. He longed to be unconscious like Jonathan and unaware that he was stuck in the trappings of wealth—the damn comforter was full of down, if he wasn't mistaken, probably from some sort of rare swan—but he was much too wired and miserable for sleep.

They could not carry on like this. That much was obvious.

At least, it was to him. Jonathan, on the other hand, was about as observant as someone lacking all five senses, and as an added bonus, he didn't share the lust. For all his brilliance in psychiatry and pharmacology, when it came to the workings of his own mind, the obvious conclusion could jump up and down in front of him wearing the Joker's face paint, and he'd still overlook it. The one time they'd done hypnotherapy was a perfect example of that.

Neither of them had wanted it. Joan had come up with the idea during his first incarceration in Arkham, when it became obvious—as it should have been from the first day—that Jonathan hated her and everyone else there who had no qualms about imprisoning their former boss, and that he would rather stop talking altogether than give her any insight into the inner workings of his mind.

So she'd come up with the idea of relaxation via suggestion, as opposed to heavy sedatives, which ran the risk of making him incoherent. And she'd chosen to spring the idea on him while he was mildly sedated, after an MRI checking the extent of the damage the Batman had caused to their mind. They'd doped him beforehand as that was before they'd perfected the meds, and he'd have twitched and ruined the tests without tranquilizers. He'd have agreed to anything at that point, as long as it got her to shut up, which is how he ended up lying on a couch in Hugo Strange's office, allowing himself to be coaxed into a trance. A trance that, thankfully, Scarecrow had not fallen under, and one that was only used to explore the recent events he'd experienced, saving delving into his past for another time.

There was not another time, because upon waking and realizing what had transpired, Jonathan had thrown a fit the likes of which would not be seen again until he woke up after the nail gun incident to find that they'd done the nasogastric tubing while he was out. But the point wasn't what had been revealed, only how Jonathan viewed it. Because according to Jonathan, the only reason he'd gone under to begin with was the sedatives.

This coming from a psychiatrist. The type of person who should know that drugs or not, it was only possible to hypnotize someone who was willing, be it subconsciously or otherwise. Jonathan was not insane, but he clung with near fanatical devotion to the belief that he was somehow above things like suggestion and manipulation, even when all their experiences indicated otherwise. Jonathan was unable to recognize that the Batman was trying to take his trust in the same way that the Joker had.

Scarecrow was not.

Which left it up to him to protect his half, an increasingly difficult task given Jonathan's absolute idiocy toward the dangers of their situation, and his insistence on speaking to the Bat. Yelling at him hadn't been the best of plans, but in his defense, Jonathan had deserved it. And the lust wasn't helping either.

Well then, he'd just have to stop being turned on. He closed his eyes, hugging the blankets as he gathered his resolve. Without the mask, the Batman was attractive, and the delicious thrill of fear had always been something Scarecrow enjoyed, but the Joker had inspired both of those things and Scarecrow no longer felt the slightest for him. He could do the same for Bruce Wayne. He could take control of the situations, calmly even, and not be distracted by his attractiveness, or his hands and all the other places he could be putting them besides Jonathan's wrists and—

_Damn it. _His eyes flew open, and he forced himself to think of the beating the Joker had given them last Halloween to halt the blood flow to his lower anatomy.

All right, so this was a problem. There was nothing to be gained by denying it, aside from catharsis. But it was nothing to lose his head over. He was the one in control while Jonathan slept. And given the Batman's inability to grasp personal space, he'd be back soon. It would only take a few harsh words to destroy whatever civility Jonathan had created, to let him know that he wasn't falling for it. It would be easy, as long as the Batman kept his hands to himself.

* * *

Alfred was cleaning the counters when Bruce got back to the kitchen, in more than a little need of a caffeine fix. He had an uncanny ability of knowing exactly where in the house Bruce would be, and materializing there, sometimes seconds before Bruce himself arrived. Considering his seven year absence, he wouldn't have put it past Alfred to implant a tracking device under his skin while he slept, though he highly doubted that was the case. It was intuition, observation, luck, or some odd combination of the three.

"Well?"

"Well what?" The coffee pot was still there, but its contents were cold. He had no reason to expect any different, and yet it was still disappointed. Probably because he'd poured and drank some of it before testing the temperature.

"Well, how badly off is he? Do we need to find a way to silence him and get him back to Arkham right now, or is there still time?"

"Oh. That." He closed the microwave door and set the time, watching the mug revolve as he stalled. "I think I'll need further assessment before making that decision."

"You didn't ask."

"He distracted me." Bruce had been planning to take the coffee black again, as opposed to exerting the effort to get the creamer, but decided against it and pulled open the refrigerator door. It gave him something to occupy his time and keep him from glancing over to see Alfred's subtly disapproving expression.

"So it would seem."

"He asked me if we were friends, Alfred." He hadn't intended to say that. Apparently, the utter insanity of the conversation was too much for him to handle. "Friends. How do I respond to that?"

"With a polite but resounding no. Or, you could forgo the politeness, if you like."

His Batman side agreed. His Batman side often agreed with Alfred, aside from the moments where Alfred's reaction was "just shoot them." His Batman side, like Alfred, was able to be unmoved by the moments when Jonathan Crane looked less like a psychotic madman and more like a frightened child. His Bruce Wayne side was far less stoic. "I said we could be." He opened the microwave and added, before Alfred could reply, "I didn't plan to. You didn't see him."

"No, but if I had, I might have kept in mind that he set you on fire before I gave him a reply."

"I _was _keeping that in mind. That, and Rachel, the Narrows…everything." He shrugged, at a loss for words, and ended up pouring half of the creamer into the coffee as a result of distraction. "I don't know. He just has this of look of disarming—"

"Insanity?"

"Helplessness, I was going to say. I know he's not. That doesn't keep him from looking it." He took a drink, forced himself not to gag at the sweetness, and when on. "I'd rather be civil with him than fighting every other second."

Alfred gave the slightest of nods before countering with "I'd rather have him out of the manor, sir."

"I know." And it wasn't as if he didn't want that too. Jonathan Crane wasn't someone to be underestimated. Physically, he was hardly intimidating, but the mind working inside the body was every bit as genius as it was twisted. He'd tried to escape at every given opportunity, and if Bruce and Alfred hadn't been as vigilant, he would have succeeded. The ease with which he left Arkham was proof of that. Even secured in the manor, he still posed a threat, both to Bruce's identity and safety. Bruce had little doubt that Jonathan would take advantage of every opportunity that came his way, be it in the form of weapons or information that he could use against Bruce should he break out. Jonathan was remorseless toward the people he'd hurt, and Bruce had no reason to believe he wouldn't be just as ruthless toward his captors.

His mere presence was a risk, every bit as much as the Joker's had been. He needed to be silenced and removed, as soon as possible.

There was no denying any of that. But sitting next to him in the guest bedroom, when he looked as if he was fighting back tears, it was hard for any of that to make an impact. He was brilliant, and there was no reason to believe that it wasn't a calculated effort to lower Bruce's guard, give himself an opportunity to strike. He'd done that with guards at Arkham before, when he'd escaped, so it only made sense to assume he'd try it again.

But even knowing that, he seemed genuine.

He'd spent time around Jonathan, even before the captivity in the cave. And he didn't lie well, not most of the time. There were occasions when his entire demeanor changed in an odd, difficult to describe manner—he stayed collected and condescending as ever, yet somehow more feral—and at those times, he lied quite well. Bruce imagined that was the state he'd been in when he manipulated the guards. But the rest of the time, his emotions were either out on his sleeve or concealed under sarcasm, and his lies were much more obvious. How he'd managed to hide his experiments for so long, Bruce wasn't sure. Perhaps he'd been a better liar then and the toxin had destroyed that ability, or the bad attempts at deception were a ruse to make him seem less cunning.

Bruce doubted the latter, though. Not even Jonathan Crane could be paranoid enough to feign poor lying throughout all of their encounters on the off chance it would be useful in the future. Probably.

No, Bruce got the feeling that he was genuine, and his instincts didn't often lead him astray. The Batman half of him agreed, though the Batman half couldn't care less if Jonathan was cunning or needy. That part just wanted the madman gone.

The Bruce Wayne half, in contrast, was stuck on the fence. He didn't want Jonathan there. Jonathan was his enemy. Jonathan had nearly killed the love of his life and was either unwilling or incapable of feeling regret for that, along with his other crimes. He tortured human beings and tried to justify it with the claim that it was for the greater good. He'd had no moral objection to threatening the city for the sake of money.

Jonathan Crane was not someone he wanted as a friend.

But he was someone Bruce wanted to help.

Because Batman, dark and menacing as he was, was meant to help Gotham City. Help by striking fear, and stopping crime, but a stopping an action in progress only did so much. He was a deterrent, but not a remedy. Prison was the remedy, or Arkham, but both had proved to be ineffectual, at least in the cases that had the most impact on the city. And while Batman's ideal was a peaceful city, Bruce recognized that peace could not exist until the root of the problems were addressed.

He had no psychiatric training. He had no particularly insightful views on the workings of the human mind. But he did want to help the villains, as strongly as he wanted to stop them, and Jonathan Crane had, for whatever reason, taken a liking to him. He was in an ideal position to take advantage of that trust, and try to bring some good out of the unlikely union. Assuming it wasn't an elaborate trap, befriending the man could be for the good of Gotham.

But there was more to it than that. He'd acknowledged that he didn't hate Jonathan, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to even dislike him. At least, for Bruce Wayne. Batman held grudges and never let go. Bruce had never considered it before, but it seemed he wasn't as harsh. There was no denying that the things Jonathan had done were monstrous, but he was beginning to feel the same sort of conflict he'd had with Ra's Al Ghul. Henri Ducard had saved his life, and been a friend to him, inspired him to become what he was today, though none of that justified his actions. Love the sinner, hate the sin, so they said. It wasn't love—he wasn't even sure it could be classified as liking—but sick and inhuman as Jonathan's transgression were, it was hard to see that when he looked at him.

What Bruce saw was wasted potential. And a cautionary tale; talent put to the wrong use. Something he could have become, had he not been as strong in his convictions. He wanted Jonathan to be punished, but at the same time, he wanted him to be repaired. He wanted to help him. And if that was a friendly action, they might as well be deemed friends, conflicted as that label made him.

He was aware that Alfred had said something and looked up, taking another drink before his mind cleared enough to remind him of the sweetness. "Yes?"

"I said, do you recall the story of the farmer and the viper?"

"All too well." He sighed, sat the mug on the counter. "I'll keep my guard up."

"See that you do." Stern as always, but with a faint but unmistakable concern.

"I will. I'm going to go talk to him again. See what's wrong."

It was a long walk to the guest bedroom, longer than it should have been, as if weighed down by doubts and misgivings. It ended at the bedroom door, where he found Jonathan on the bed, huddled in blankets, and with a very different look in his eyes than the one he'd had earlier.

* * *

AN: Hugo Strange is a villain from the Batman comics. He uses hypnosis and other things to manipulate people.

The Farmer and the Viper is a fable about a farmer who finds a viper in the snow. The viper begs the farmer to carry it to safety inside the farmer's coat, or it will freeze to death. The farmer initially refuses for fear of being bitten, but the viper persuades him by pointing out that killing the farmer would make it freeze. So the farmer begins carrying the viper and is bitten soon after. While he's dying, the farmer asks the viper why it bit him, since it will die too now, and the viper replies "Because I'm a snake."

I've never been too big of a fan of that story, as though seems to teach "Bad people cannot help themselves," everyone I've ever heard tell it seems to interpret and teach it as "Bad people are always bad, so don't be nice to them." Other than that, it's an interesting story.


	43. Reminiscent

AN: So, that whole "working two shifts in one day" thing? Not a good idea, especially if your jobs involve physical exertion. Also, if you learn a language one year and take it the next, it might be a good idea to look at it over the summer. As I did not do. And that's my public service announcement for the evening.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Just once, Bruce wished that he could leave the room for five seconds without something going wrong. Not that things didn't go wrong when he was in the room as well—the panic attack in the bath was a wonderful example—but at least then he was there to witness the change, and gain some insight into whatever had gone awry. Walking into the room to find that Jonathan's demeanor had changed from that of an affection-starved kitten to that of an angry tiger gave far less insight, and far more discomfort.

Bruce decided that it would be better to ignore this new development, adverse as Jonathan was to discussing his mental state. He cast about for something innocuous to comment on, settling on the blankets. "Are you cold?"

"Nothing gets past you, does it?"

He chose to ignore that as well. Jonathan had yet to look directly at him, his voice as flat and hateful as it had been when he'd first readjusted to the antipsychotics. One step forward, one mile back, so it would seem. "Did the hot water run out?" he asked, taking in the man's half-dried hair.

"Does it matter?"

_Oh, this is going to be fun. _He crossed the room and sat on the bed, trying to overlook the way Jonathan immediately moved as far from him as he could without falling off the mattress. "You know," he said, hoping his tone was neutral and not accusing, "friends tend to have conversations willingly."

Jonathan straightened, one hand emerged from under the blankets long enough to brush his hair away from his eyes. The action was so rigid that it almost looked like a parody of his usual stiffness. Bruce supposed it was the cold. "Yes. Well, I've thought about it, and I don't want to be friends anymore."

That was it. The medication must have quit working. It was only a matter of time before the shaking and hallucinations started back up. That was the only explanation for such an abrupt change, especially considering that someone with Jonathan's intellect had to realize that staying on civil terms with his captor was in his best interest. Bruce had to get him back to Arkham before the week was out. Before the day was out, ideally.

Not that he expressed any of this. His response consisted only of a nonchalant "Oh. Can I ask why?"

"Yes, you can. But I'm not giving you an answer."

"Okay." He needed something to force him into silence about Bruce's identity, something that didn't involve murder or brain damage. And fast. Maybe Alfred would have some idea. "Is that because you don't want to talk now, or because you don't want to talk at all?"

"It's because you're not privy to the inner workings of my mind, Batman." The separation between the words of the name were more pronounced than usual, as they had been when he'd first become a captive. It was as if the entire progression of their interactions had been undone, or severely regressed. As was his argument. Regression was a symptom of mental illness, wasn't it? This day just got better and better.

"Acually, when you're in my home, it does—"

"Go to hell."

Well, _that _was new. Usually, his insults only became that base after a long argument or a failed escape attempt. _It that's the way it's going to go, there's not much point in skipping around the issue. _"Are you sick again?"

"Excuse me?"

"Are you sick again? Because you're acting like it."

Bruce had never seen eyes so blue look so on fire before. Those eyes closed as Jonathan visibly tried to compose himself and failed miserably. "Really? I hadn't realized that I'd begun mutilating myself and talking to imaginary people again. I'm fairly certain you're real, as my subconscious couldn't be _that _cruel."

Sarcasm. It was a standard defense mechanism for the man, and there was no reason to look at it as unusual. Except that the inflections on the words were wrong, the tone far more obvious than normal. It could have been paranoia, but Bruce took it as another sign of the underlying problem.

"I was referring to the mood swings."

"Considering the length of my imprisonment and the fact that you've only begun to allow me intellectual stimulation in the past few days, I'd think a few shifts in temperament are to be expected. If I _were _to go mad, I'd blame your hospitality before the medication."

"You were fine with my hospitality ten minutes ago."

"That was then, wasn't it?"

"You need to go back to Arkham."

"Fine by me." He swung his legs over the side of the bed, starting to unwrap himself from the sheets. "I didn't bother to unpack anything, so we can leave immediately."

This coming from the person who'd been desperate for Bruce's affection less than half an hour ago. Either Jonathan had lost it completely, or he had. And despite the fact that he enjoyed dressing up as a bat and jumping off buildings, Bruce doubted it was him. "I didn't mean now."

"Get my hopes up, why don't you?" He'd let the blankets fall, and immediately wrapped his arms around himself, shuddering. Bruce couldn't tell if he was still cold or if the gesture was made in pain, and moved toward him.

"Are you all right?"

"I'd be m-much better if you left me alone." He swung one hand out, probably intended to signal "go away," and instead collided with Bruce's own hand, which he'd reached out in concern. His skin felt like ice.

"You're freezing." Bruce took the hand in his own, failing to note the violent shudder that went through Jonathan as he did. "What did you do, turn the cold water on full blast?"

"Let go of me!" He pulled back with far more force than necessary, the movement sending him of the edge he'd sat too close to in his attempt to get away. He fell backward, and Bruce darted forward to grab him before he could hit the floor, hauling him back up.

"Calm down," he ordered, right as the man recovered from the disorientation and began struggling harder than ever.

"_Get off_!"

"No." He narrowly avoided a slap to the face and grabbed Jonathan's wrists. "What is _wrong _with you?"

* * *

What was wrong with him? The Batman had the gall to ask what was wrong with him? While holding his wrists and pinning him to a bed? What the hell did he _think _was wrong?

Though to be fair, the arousal hadn't started until he'd been held down. He'd jerked away when the Bat took his hand in fear of that sparking something. Which, as he now recognized all too well, had not been a wise decision. Having the Batman's hands on him was bad enough, but being forcibly held down with the Bat's body pressed against him was all too reminiscent of Jonathan's first kiss with the Joker. The Joker had turned out to be a manipulating bastard, but that didn't make him any less hot. All in all, most definitely not the memory he wanted in his mind when the Prince of Gotham was practically straddling him.

At least the Bat hadn't noticed. Thank God for small favors.

"Let go of me!" He tried kicking. And found that anything that required moving his hips was _not _something he wanted to attempt.

"I can't. Not when you're acting like this."

"I wouldn't be acting like this if you'd just _let go_!"

He felt Jonathan stirring. _Fuck. _The aspirin would just have started to truly take effect by now; how was he waking up? Had the side effect worn off? All the struggling couldn't have helped, or the fact that Scarecrow had resisted sleep. _Shit._

He was vaguely aware that the Batman was still over top of him, yelling questions and keeping him trapped. He didn't have energy to expend on that, though, or even on the growing need in his groin. His physical reserve was devoted to fighting with all he had, and his mental devoted to keeping Jonathan out. The last thing he needed was for Jonathan to wake up and let something slip to the Bat.

Or discover the fact that his alter ego was sexually attracted to their nemesis. That would be incredibly counterproductive to his cause.

But all the struggles in the world didn't make up for the fact that the body was, by default, Jonathan's. And while Scarecrow could close himself off or keep the worst of the drugs from touching him, he couldn't stop the fact that when Jonathan woke up, he took control.

He let out one last, desperate kick, ignoring the way it brought him far too close for comfort, and felt himself fade.

* * *

"Stop!"

Jonathan froze, shaking. There were hands on his wrists, crushingly tight, keeping his arms over his head. The hands belonged to a body, and the body was on him, keeping his own form as immobile as his arms. Aside from that, he was at a loss to the owner of the body, or even his locations. Someone had removed his glasses, or he'd lost them during the struggle.

He got the feeling that this person was familiar, someone he ought to know, but his mind seemed trapped behind a haze of fog, a mental smoke screen keeping his mind from working at full capacity. He strained to remember the events leading up to this, and only came up with a lot of black, after falling asleep abruptly.

Had he been drugged?

He tried reaching out to Scarecrow, but the link was closed. He got a brief glimpse of the other's feelings before they were shut off as well, feeling rage and shame. It occurred to him that those emotions hardly indicated something good, but he couldn't seem to make himself care beyond that.

Especially when he realized the other oddity of the situation; namely, the blood pooling between his legs.

Well, that didn't make the slightest bit of sense.

One of the hands pinning him shifted, releasing his wrist as the other grabbed it, and brushed the hair away from his face. It came to rest on his forehead, possibly checking his temperature. There were still questions being thrown at him, but he couldn't bring himself to care long enough to answer. The hand against him made his blood flow all the faster, in a way that was uncomfortable but pleasant.

The rest of the situation, however, was not pleasant, and as he couldn't think of a way to put an end to it, he tried thinking back to see if he'd had any previous experiences like this, and how he'd gotten out of them. The only thing that came to his sedated mind was the time the Joker had first kissed him, holding him down on the bed and refusing to let go until Jonathan kissed back.

No better method came to mind, so Jonathan sat up as much as he could, from his position, and pressed his lips against those of his captor.


	44. Aftermath

AN: Here's an insight into how my work ethic functions: I have Latin homework tonight, and I've managed to forget most of it over the summer. So rather than say, do that first, I looked over the Latin, then started writing this, and am planning on doing the actual assignment after I finish the chapter, and finish what I don't get done then tomorrow morning. To be fair, I've had an extremely crappy day, so this is my way of relieving stress, but still. I have no idea how I get good grades this way. Kids, don't emulate this.

And there will be more Bruce reaction in the next chapter.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

For a moment, Bruce was too shocked to move. Which, as he was still lying on top of a psychopath—a psychopath who was _kissing _him—was the worst possible reaction he could have had. He knew exactly what his reaction ought to have been—to jump off, subdue the man, and drag him back to Arkham before this could get any worse—but knowing that and making himself respond were hardly the same, and right now, the connection between his mind and his body seemed to have shorted out.

_Why does this keep happening?_

This was the third time that he'd had an enemy kiss him. It would have been more than that, if he'd ever let Isley close enough to use the poisonous lipstick she'd inoculated herself against, but as it was, it had fortunately only happened twice before. Unfortunately, both times had been with the Joker.

At least Jonathan's breath carried the scent of spearmint instead of gingivitis.

The fact that he was comparing forced lip-locks was enough to jolt his mind and body back into rhythm, allowing him to pull away, ending the kiss and getting him off of Jonathan. Apparently the observational part of his mind took long to catch up than the reflexive section did, as he didn't realized he'd rolled in the direction that would send him off the bed until he was already on the floor.

The sound of impact was surprisingly loud against the carpet. Bruce imagined it would hurt quite a bit when the shock wore off. He pulled himself into a sitting position, mind reeling from this latest wrench in the works.

"What the hell was that about?"

His tone came out harsher than he'd intended. He might have cared if he was capably of focusing on anything besides the fact that Jonathan Crane had kissed him. He was louder than he'd intended as well, and he expected Jonathan to cringe.

He didn't. He didn't move at all, still lying on his back, his arms over his head. His eyes shifted to watch Bruce, slowly, but that was the extent of his movement. That didn't bode well. What was that, catatonia? Had the kiss been the swan song of functional madness before his mind shut down completely?

He had better not be catatonic. If only because Bruce had to know _why _he'd done that, much as he'd like to never think of it again, because if he didn't, the morbid curiosity was going to tear him apart. "Jonathan?"

"Eh?" He turned his head, as listlessly as he'd moved his eyes. There was no trace of the infuriated, violent mess he'd been less than five minutes ago. There was no way that was a mood swing. Either something was seriously wrong with him, or this was a calculated act meant to achieve something Bruce couldn't conceive of. And he doubted it was the latter.

This was not a good day.

"What's wrong with you?"

Jonathan moved again, shifted one arm straight out while the other covered his mouth, stifling a yawn. "Huh?"

If he was faking, he seemed to have moved from catatonia to stupidity. Which made the odds of faking even lower; Jonathan wasn't as brilliant as he considered himself, but he was brilliant. Pretending to be brainless would be so obviously out of character that even someone as socially clueless as Jonathan had to know it wouldn't work.

So he had well and truly lost it. It was only a matter of time, but Bruce couldn't help but wish that the time hadn't come while Jonathan was still in Wayne Manor.

He leaned down, trying not to think about Jonathan's response the last time he got this close. Of course he failed miserably at pretending that hadn't happened, and felt his face flush, surely as red as Jonathan's still was, despite the fact that he was no longer struggling. Maybe he was feverish, and hallucinating. That had to be it. There was just no way that Jonathan Crane would kiss him.

With the Joker, it had made sense, wrong as it had been. The Joker was constantly professing his love for Batman. Whether those confessions were made in honesty, or as mind games, Bruce was never sure, but they were expressions of the Joker's idea of love, so kissing the object of his affection made perfect sense. It was vile, but it was logical.

Jonathan, on the other hand, hated him with a burning passion and routinely acted as if any physical contact with the man felt like acid, so there was no reason for him to kiss Bruce. It was illogical, shocking, and, worst of all, hadn't felt horrible.

He refused to let himself dwell on that, commanding his attention back to the task at hand. "Jonathan. Why did you do that?"

He closed his eyes slowly, keeping them shut for so long that he seemed to have fallen asleep. Bruce was about to ask again, and much louder, when Jonathan opened his eyes, just as slowly, and blinked at him. "…Tired."

There were a great number of questions in the world for which "tired" was an acceptable answer. "Why did you just kiss me after throwing a screaming fit about how you didn't want to touched?" was not one such question. "Jonathan."

Jonathan closed his eyes again, turned away from Bruce with a faint "nnh."

Absolutely not. Bruce considered himself to be a reasonable man, and he knew from the dissociated Joker experience that pushing someone on the edge too far would lead to a traumatizing break, but he could not let this slide. There was a maelstrom of emotion whirling inside him as a result of Jonathan's actions, and he couldn't begin to work out his feelings until he figured out what in God's name had sparked _that._ He took Jonathan's shoulders, turning him back to face him, and shook the man, gently. "Jonathan. We're talking."

Jonathan opened his eyes again, giving Bruce a faint, hazed glare. He looked drugged. It could be a side effect of the medication, but he'd already adjusted. Was it even possible for side effects to show up now? "What'dya…want?"

"We're talking." He hauled Jonathan upright, into a sitting position. Jonathan rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands, a mannerism reminiscent of a small child, one that was completely incongruous to the situation at hand.

"…'Bout what?" Another yawn.

About what? About _what_? Jesus Christ. He wasn't just sick. He was seriously damaged, not to realize that something was horribly wrong with his actions. Bruce was beginning to think that this was some twisted gambit to drive him mad, because that was becoming the only rational conclusion. It couldn't be madness, because Bruce refused to believe the world would be so cruel as to allow insanity that great. And this couldn't be an act of repressed lust. It just couldn't. There was no way lust could cause a person to change so dramatically. The idea was too stupid to entertain. "About why you _kissed _me!"

He hadn't meant to shout it. And he cringed inwardly to see Jonathan's eyes widen when he did. But at least it seemed to snap him out of whatever influence he was under. Jonathan straightened, eyes darting from Bruce to look downwards, and then quickly back to Bruce before he buried his face in his hands.

* * *

_Oh God oh God oh God. Oh God._

He had kissed Batman. He had _kissed Batman._ Batman. This was—he couldn't even respond to it. He couldn't handle this. He needed an emergency exit, and now. He reached out to Scarecrow—

—And found their link closed. It would appear that this was too much for Scarecrow to handle as well, and Scarecrow could handle _anything. _He hadn't left the last time because he couldn't handle the madness, just because he wanted no part in it. But this—this was the straw that broke the camel's back, it seemed. Jonathan wanted nothing more than to fade with his other half, not caring if he seemed dead to the world, but even in his panic, he realized that Batman was not going to leave if he didn't respond. Because Batman was evil.

Even if he was attract—_What the hell? _Where had that come from? That was not a thought he wanted in his mind, ever, and it wasn't the sort of thing that should be there in the first place—

Confusion slowed his racing thoughts just enough to bring something else to his attention. Namely, the fact that he appeared to be aroused.

_Oh, Jesus fucking Christ._ This was what happened when he fell asleep, something he planned on never, ever doing again, now. Damn Scarecrow and his insistence that Jonathan take aspirin. Why? So his other half could be amused when he woke up, confused and turned on with the Batman on top of him? He had no idea what had gone on while he was asleep, and considering how much the waking situation looked like date rape, he had the feeling that was for the best.

He tried to force his breathing under control before he hyperventilated. _Okay…okay—there's nothing okay about this!—breathe. Just breathe. All you have to do is wait for him to go away, and then you can take a cold shower or whatever and pretended this never happened and work out an escape plan and get far, far away from here, and never have to think about this ever again, and everything will be fine—_

"Jonathan."

Oh, fuck. Of course Batman couldn't make things simple by putting that disappearing trick of his to good use for once.

"Go away. Please." He didn't look up. He couldn't look up, both because he was mortified and because he had no idea how his body would respond, and didn't want to find out. As if things weren't bad enough, he was freezing cold, which only served to make the sensation in his lower anatomy all the more obvious.

He was going to _kill _Scarecrow when this was all over with.

"No." There was a hint of the Bat growl to his voice, and it made Jonathan shiver.

"I said please."

"I don't care. You're acting completely insane. I realize that you're a mental patient and you've been locked up, but that doesn't excuse any of this. You can't scream at me one second and then…_kiss _me the next, and expect me to let that slide. It's not happening."

"So take me back to Arkham." He brought his legs together, and wrapped his arms around them, resting his head on his knees. Thank God he was wearing pants that were slightly too large. Or, they had been slightly too large. Hopefully, the shame had been concealed.

"I'm going to. But every second that you're still in this house, you're a threat, and I want to know what's going on. Right now."

"I…no."

"It's not a choice. You're acting as if your medication isn't working at all, and you're a danger to everyone here, yourself included. Jonathan—"

Batman put his hands on Jonathan's, and the warmth against his skin was _not _helpful in the least at reducing the tension. "Get off!"

"Tell me what's wrong, and I will."

He raised his head, eyes darting every which way for an escape route. There was none, but the dim light through the barred window reminded him that the Bat would want to be leaving soon. "Tomorrow."

"What?"

"I'll tell you everything. Tomorrow. Come back then." Tomorrow. That should be time to come up with something. A lie, and a way to keep his body from ever reacting this way again.

Batman sighed. "Jonathan—"

"_Please. _I'll tell you anything you want then. I promise."

A long pause, and another sigh. Something about Jonathan's expression must have gotten through, thank God. "Fine. But you're going to keep that promise, like it or not." And then Batman stood, and left the room, locking the door behind him.

Jonathan ran to the bathroom the second the door was closed, turning the shower on before deciding that he was far, far too cold to get in the water. Which was how he ended up outside the shower, leaning against one of its glass doors, pants around his ankles as he tried desperately not to think of Batman, or the fact that water wasn't the only liquid circling the drain.

He failed miserably on both counts.


	45. Nothing At All

AN: Sorry about the delay on this one. I had to do job training yesterday—one video included the memorable line "The AIDs virus is fatal, and everyone with AIDs will eventually die," spoken as if other people lived forever—and that combined with classes and going to work immediately after sapped my will to write rather horribly.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

In another few months, it would be October. And October thirty-first would mark one year since the Joker had exposed Harvey Dent as the man behind the murders Batman had taken the blame for. One year from the night when Gotham found out the truth, and Batman had been able to stop hiding from the GPD, though their trust for him was severely limited and probably always would be.

One year since Gotham lost hope.

In an ideal world, that would have been the night when things started to turn around again. When Batman had been presumed guilty, his connections with the GPD were limited to the Commissioner, and even then, only in secret. "Tracking down the Batman" had moved from an investigation in name only to a witch-hunt, driven by the fear, grief, and rage caused by the Joker's attacks, and a near fanatical devotion to the memory of Harvey Dent, with Batman serving as the antithesis to the DA's ideals.

And last Halloween, the Joker had taken that memory and torn it to shreds, using the video Jonathan Crane had filmed of the living, scarred Harvey Dent as the metaphorical knife. The man-hunt lost its ferocity quickly after, reduced to nearly the level of disinterest it had held before the Joker's attacks. And that should have been the moment Gotham turned around again, this time for the better.

It wasn't. Because just as the Joker predicted, without the untarnished image of their White Knight to lead them, the citizens of Gotham gave up.

Without Dent to investigate corruption, and without Batman trying to stop it, as he'd been able to do before he'd gone into hiding, the mob had slowly infiltrated the ranks of the police force again, and now the city had decided that fighting for change would take too much effort. The mob itself was deeply wounded by its loss, in both finances and members, and their struggles to regain their full power had led to vicious gang warfare, bloody by even Gotham's standards. No one believed it could be stopped, as they had under Dent's jurisdiction, and it was the path of least resistance to ignore it, so they did.

In the face of insurmountable odds, the fact that Jonathan Crane kissed him shouldn't be worth the effort it took to care. But shouldn't and didn't were polar opposites in this case.

Being kissed by an enemy was confusing enough. The fact that Jonathan was starting to slip out of the category of enemy and into something indefinable did not help at all. What their relationship was, exactly, Bruce had no idea—it was hard to hate someone after seeing him so broken—but the part of Jonathan's personality that was present at the man's most lucid seemed to view Bruce as a friend. And that was the part that had surfaced after the kiss, so it stood to reason that the kiss had been a sign of affection, not an attempt to shock Bruce into letting go.

To make matters worse, the sensation had hit his body before his mind had time to react to _whom _the kiss was coming from. The fact of the matter was that Jonathan Crane's mouth against his own did not contain the bitter taste of greasepaint or the decayed flavor that had made the Joker's kisses repulsive, and actually felt no different than the lips of a woman. A short haired, flat-chested woman with male anatomy, true, but as far as surprise kisses went—and he got a lot of them, as a billionaire playboy—it wasn't unpleasant.

Physically, anyway. Mentally, it had and was still doing a great deal of harm. This was unacceptable. It was one thing to keep a psychopath as an almost pet when it wasn't interfering with him professionally, but now that it was, it had to stop. He'd have to put his foot down. Make Jonathan give him the cause of the madness now, so he could put a stop to it, or take him back to Arkham. True, he had nothing to keep him silent, but Jonathan was a mental patient, and the wounds from his last episode had yet to fully heal. It was possible that the Arkham staff would think he'd gone mad, and hallucinated the entire event before somehow getting his hands on antipsychotics again.

Possible. Very, very unlikely, but possible.

At this point, it was either that or lose it himself.

It was hardly helpful that he was conflicted over taking Jonathan back at all, even with the identity issue out of the equation. That the man needed help was undeniable, but Arkham rarely offered help. Its patients were treated with disinterest or abuse all too often, and neither of those would be advantageous in overcoming psychosis.

Still, where else was Bruce supposed to put him? It wasn't as if he could stay in Wayne Manor forever.

That would be ridiculous.

* * *

Scarecrow opened his eyes and found himself in the foyer of the manor where Jonathan had grown up, exactly at the spot where he'd last dreamed himself standing with the Joker. The Joker was nowhere to be found, now.

"No," he said aloud, as if to give the words more force. "Jonathan is the dreamer. I am not." There was no change to the room around him. He sighed, closed his eyes. "I dislike dreaming and I refuse to take part in it. When I open my eyes, I will find myself in Wayne Manor. Any other place is unacceptable."

He gathered his resolve, inhaled, and opened his eyes. Scarecrow exhaled in disappoint, finding the room around him unchanged.

Well, not quite unchanged. He had not taken the time to notice it before, but the manor was no longer the decomposing shack it had been in the last dream. Nor was it in the state of disrepair it had been in Jonathan's youth. Rather, the manor was spotless, the paint and wallpaper new. The floor was no longer scratched and dull, but shining and flawless. It seemed to have returned to the former glory that Jonathan's great grandmother had spoken of so often.

All that kept Scarecrow from deciding this could be a good dream was the small matter of the house still having the malevolent air of the previous dream.

He glanced down. The yarn was still stretched out from inside him to somewhere deeper within the house, though it looked smoother now. He put his fingers to it, gently, feeling moisture. There was a small amount of liquid on his hand when he moved it back, faint pink in color.

From the kitchen, there was music.

Singing, to be precise. He strained to listen and caught words. "_—he stood ready to catch her in his arms. There was blood all in the kitchen—_"

Against his better judgment, Scarecrow moved forward. The feel of the yarn going inside him was uncomfortable and indescribable as ever, and it didn't seem to be sliding in as quickly anymore.

"_There was blood all in the hall._" It was a woman's voice, and one he'd heard somewhere before. "_There was blood all in the parlor where—_"

"Mother?" He froze as the word left his lips, unbidden. He had not meant to let anything in this house no of his presence. And he had not meant to say "mother." She was Jonathan's mother, not his, and he had always recognized that.

"Scarecrow?" The hallway light flickered on—and with the flicker, things went dark for a moment—and it was not Jonathan's mother who stepped out.

"Harley?"

She stood in the doorway, and she was not rotting as the Joker had been. She was smiling at him, and it was not the manic or plastered-on smile she wore after becoming the Joker's. It was a real smile, a kind smile, as she had worn when she first met Jonathan, over a year ago. "I am happy to see you."

This did not make any sense. Harley was not his friend; she was Jonathan's. They had never even been formally introduced, and besides, Scarecrow did not like her. She had posed the same threat to Jonathan that the Batman did now, though with less of a risk. Like all psychiatrists, she had hoped to gain Jonathan's trust, as did the Bat, and use that trust to change and control him. Jonathan was too naïve to see her goal, but Scarecrow was not. He had never trusted her, and he had never liked her. At least the Joker was unpredictable enough to keep Jonathan going to Scarecrow for advice on the relationship. "Why are you in my home?"

She kept smiling, silent. She was wearing glasses, the ones she had had as a psychiatrist, and she was dressed in a medical coat, blouse, and skirt, as she had worn so often professionally. There was, however, an incongruous red and white apron tied around her waist, which she wiped her hands on. "Baking. Come here."

"What?"

She disappeared into the kitchen without response.

Scarecrow steadied his breath—and why a psychiatrist turned henchwench should make it uneven to begin with, he was not sure—and followed. The yarn before him lead to the kitchen, though once he reached the doorway, he found that it twisted around the table and chairs, disappearing through the other door. He noted that all of the counters were covered in pans, and on each pan sat rows of cookies, before Harley was in front of him, pressing something into his hand. Her makeup was so perfectly and symmetrically applied that she resembled a china doll, and not one hair on her head was out of place. "Here you go."

He glanced down at the sugar cookie in his hand, still warm from the oven, while she took him by the shoulders and led him to the nearest chair. The table was free of pans, though a serving platter sat in the middle, covered in cookies, from chocolate chip to snickerdoodle and everything in between. Things went dark again for a moment—once more accompanied by a flicker of the light—and he came back to find Harley placing a glass of milk beside him, her smile wider. "What brings you here, Scarecrow?"

He took a bite of the sugar cookie. It was not good. It was not bad, either, but tasteless, like eating nothing. Nothing with texture and weight to it. "I am looking for my Jonathan."

"I don't care."

He started, whirling to the side to face Harley. She stood, back to him, placing dough on a baking sheet. It had not been her voice he'd heard, but Jonathan's mother's, and it was a phrase she had told him often in his young childhood, before she had softened to a polite indifference as opposed to a cold one, and before he had learned to stop going to her in hopes of help. "What?"

"Where, I said." She turned to him as she walked to the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of eggs. The makeup was overdone, really. It made her look too pale in comparison, and whatever she had done with her lipstick made her smile almost unnaturally wide. "Where are you looking?"

He touched the yarn again. Unlike when the Joker had laid hands on it, his own touch was comforting as opposed to painful. "I am following this. What are you doing here?"

"Nothing." Noticing the cookie in his hand, and the sole bite in it, she took it from him, replacing it with an oatmeal raisin from the platter. He took a bite of that, once again without flavor. The texture was odd, small and gritty. "What will you do when you find your Jonathan?"

"Take us out of here."

The light flickered a third time, bringing the blackness with it. He wished the dark would stay. That, at least, he was familiar with, having experienced it forever and always before these dreams.

"What makes you think He would want you?"

The cookie fell from Scarecrow's hand. That was not Harley's voice, and nor was it his mother's. It was the great-grandmother's, and he was certain that the "he" was capitalized, referring to her divinity, the God she had always claimed would banish Jonathan to hell for his wickedness.

He felt cold.

"Harley?"

She was sitting beside him, smile wide as ever. It no longer looked warm or genuine, reminding him more of a Stepford wife than anything else. Her skin was white, almost as white as it was when she wore the face paint. She reached over, and placed her hand on his. It was cool, and hard. "I am sure you will find him and everything will be perfect."

He pulled his hand back, shivering. Harley opened her mouth to speak again, and the timer on the oven went off. She stood, stopping the alarm and pulling the door open.

"I think that I should go," Scarecrow said, attempting to push his chair back. It pulled on the yarn to do so, and the yarn refused to move, keeping him pinned.

"But you will enjoy these," she said, carrying the pan over. She was not wearing oven mitts. Her movements were jerky and unnatural, looking less like a human's and more like a creature from the Uncanny Valley. "These are perfect."

Harley sat the pan directly on the table, apparently unconcerned with the scorch marks it would leave. Her hands were unharmed. She moved to the counter and from the chopping block took the butcher's knife. The cookies in this pan had been made in a solid block, as opposed to individual forms, and she sunk the blade into it, slicing rows.

"Here you ar—" She paused as she lifted a piece, tilting it to the side. Dust fell out, in a thick gray cloud, until there was nothing left but the thin layer of cookie that had covered the top and bottom, shells of crust that dissolved into dust as well when she crushed them between her forefinger and thumb. Frowning, she lifted another slice and repeated the process.

Scarecrow coughed, waving the dust out of his face. "How—"

"That," she said, sighing, "is the problem with these recipes. The ingredients are specially chosen because they work so well together—" She lifted the knife out of the pan, wiping the dust on her apron. "—And the tastes complement each other so well—" She raised the knife, inspecting its cleanliness. "—that the recipe promises they complete each other—" She moved the knife outward, slightly. "—But the truth is, the supposed connections—" The blade was directly over the yarn, sparkling with the reflection of the overhead light. "—are actually nothing special. Nothing at all."

She was not smiling anymore, but grinning. And she looked less like Harley now, less human altogether. More like a doll, the features blank. She looked like Harley, Jonathan's mother, and Jonathan's great-grandmother all at once, and she brought the knife down, laughing as she did it—

Scarecrow bolted up, upending the chair in the process. He bolted to the right as he did so, and that was what kept the yarn from being severed. Harley swung the knife again, shrieking more than laughing, and he did the first thing that came to mind: grabbing the side of the table and flipping it upwards, on top of her. There was a sickening crunch when it hit her, and another when she landed against the refrigerator, slumping down to the floor.

Her face had cracked from the impact.

Scarecrow watched, frozen, as the cracks widened, pieces of her head falling like broken china to the ground. From the shifts under her clothing, her body was doing the same. For a moment, he saw brain matter, tissue, and sinew, and then it dissolved to dust, spilling out onto the floor. She was no longer a threat.

She was nothing.

Scarecrow fell to his knees, gagging—

* * *

—And awoke to find himself panting and shaking, heart racing at surely three times the healthy rate. The bedroom was dark, and his inability to make out his surrounding immediately only added to the terror.

Someone was holding him, tightly. Someone was stroking his hair and whispering that he was all right, he was safe, and relax, no one was going to hurt him. That someone was strong and warm and powerful, and for a moment Scarecrow was content to be held as he hyperventilated, resting his head on that someone's shoulder, eyes wide open in an attempt to keep stinging tears from sliding out.

And then he realized who was holding him, and any comfort he might have gleaned was gone.

"Let go!" he shrieked, kicking and flailing with all he had, to no avail. The Batman was too strong to be moved, and it enraged and frightened him all the more. "Get off!"

"Jonathan, I'm trying to—"

He screamed with renewed fury, fighting harder than ever. It wasn't his name. It was his other's half, as were the dreams, but the dreams were leaking into his own mind against his will, and he couldn't handle anything else of Jonathan's slipping in to torment him. It was too much for him, with the fear that these nightmares were signs that Jonathan's madness was coming over, bit by bit.

"Please, Jonathan—"

"Don't call me that! _Idiot!_" He finally managed a punch to the stomach, driving the Bat off as he gasped for air. "Why can't you tell us apart?"

* * *

AN: What Harley's singing is part of "Long Lankin," a child's ballad. It's on Youtube, and the full lyrics are on Google.

The Uncanny Valley is a concept that when something looks very human but has one aspect that throws it off, it gives spectators a strong negative reaction. There is a long list of examples of the Uncanny Valley compiled here: tvtropes. org/ pmwiki/ pmwiki. php/ Main/ UncannyValley But if you're pressed for time, I've found that the puppets in the music videos for Daft Punk's "Technologic" and Interpol's "Evil," both on Youtube, tend to get the strongest reactions. Weirdly, I myself seem to have almost no sense of the Uncanny Valley, and the only one that consistently creeps me out is the Little Girl Giant Mega-Marionette, also on Youtube.


	46. Confession

AN: Sorry about the delay. Friday managed to be a good day, for once. (Every day of my first week of classes, apart from then, had some aspect that made them suck.) Friday, on the other hand, I only had to work one shift, I actually knew the sentence my Latin teacher wanted me to translate—lucky guess, but still—and I got two Free Hugs. Also, Happy Friday Guy—campus "superhero" who rides around on a scooter (not the motorized kind) on Fridays while wearing a cape reading Happy Friday and shouting "Happy Friday" at students—said a personal "Happy Friday" to me. So all in all, things were pretty wonderful. Anyway, all the happy was a bit overwhelming and I ended up socializing for once, instead of writing. Which isn't to say that I don't socialize, just not to that extent, usually.

Happy Friday Guy can be found on Youtube, by searching for "Happy Friday Guy."

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"What?"

Scarecrow didn't answer, didn't take the time to enjoy the fact that the Batman was doubled over, gasping for breath. That should have been cause for gloating, or at least a sarcastic one liner, but he'd never felt less like snarking in his life. His heart was racing, mind flickering through the nightmarish images against his will, refusing to fade with awakening. He was unable to focus on the questions the Bat was choking out, still winded, and barely able to recall the fragmented conversation that they'd just had.

It was hard to focus on anything in the real world when he was still seeing Harley's face, fragmented like a shattered porcelain doll, still tasting dust in his mouth.

The part of him that was still able to think rationally recognized that this wasn't a good sign. His last dream had been terrifying, every bit as disturbing as the one he'd just woken up from, and that time, he'd awoken to find himself in the arms of the Bat as well, but he hadn't allowed it to override him like this. Screaming at Jonathan hadn't been the best decision, true, but at least he'd been together enough to shout about the hugging, not the Joker's animate corpse or the Georgian manor his mind had reproduced.

His sanity, as Jonathan had described it to the Joker, was slipping through his fingers. Like stitches sliding out and opening an infected wound.

Whirling away from the Batman, he jumped off the bed, the impact reverberating through the floor, and ran to the open doorway—

—Only to have a hand grab his arm and pull him back in, the grip tight enough to make him cry out.

_Damn him. _Scarecrow spun back to face the Bat, fist swinging out to meet his stomach, only to have the blow blocked. It seemed the same trick wouldn't work twice. He brought his fist back, hoping to collide it with the Batman's throat this time, but the bastard grabbed his wrist, pulling his arms down and dragging him too close to let him kick. "Take your hands off me!"

"No. What did you just say?" He was trying to sound calm, but the soothing tone only served to remind Scarecrow of Harley's voice and smile in the nightmare, making him fight all the harder. The Bat moved his feet when Scarecrow tried stomp on them, and out of other options, and held his hands too low to allowing kneeing. Out of other options, Scarecrow turned to the last recourse: noise.

"_GET OFF!_"

He shouted it with everything he had, feeling the words strip his throat as he did. The sound was loud enough to make his ears throb, and considering the he'd shouted it in the Batman's face, it must have hurt the other man just as badly, if not more. Sure enough, the Bat flinched, grip loosening, and Scarecrow wrenched himself free, running into the hallway.

Behind him the Batman was shouting, and there were footsteps running close behind him. Scarecrow didn't stop to comprehend the words, racing forward with everything he had. His heart was pulsing so quickly it was difficult to discern where one beat ended and another began, and he was moving in a panic, darting around corners with no idea as to where he was headed, but the fruitlessness of the motion didn't matter. What mattered was getting as far away from the Bat as he could, finding a safe place to hide until this panic attack or whatever the hell it was had ended.

He turned fast enough to throw himself off balance, and struggled to regain his footing, reducing his speed and allowing the Bat to grab him from behind. He kicked and screamed with everything he had, but his struggles failed to do anything against the vice-like grip restricting his movements.

"Jonathan—"

Whatever composure he'd managed to regain shattered into microscopic fragments at the name. One thought overrode his reasoning, the thought being that he was _not _Jonathan. Jonathan was the one who let himself be coerced by others. Jonathan was the one who let himself be hurt. Jonathan was the mad one, not him, and Jonathan was supposed to be the one having the nightmares. Jonathan was the one waking up as Scarecrow struggled, the one demanding information and begging to take control and salvage what he could of the situation. "That is _NOT my name_!"

It was the last thing he managed before Jonathan shoved him aside, removing the final bit of control he'd been clinging to.

* * *

"What?"

Jonathan didn't answer, but his struggles immediately ceased. Just when Bruce had thought things couldn't get any more disorienting. His ears were still ringing from the man's shouts, head spinning as he tried to piece together just what the hell was going on. It was obviously some kind of a breakdown, but Jonathan's breakdowns had always coming in the form of silence or sobbing before, never violence. What had caused such a marked change in reaction, Bruce had no idea.

But at the moment, the cause wasn't his priority. The breakdown was only a symptom, and it was the underlying condition that was the focus. Whatever had taken him from his normal, somewhat controlled state and made him such a wreck. That was the key to figuring out what the hell had been wrong with the man for the past few days.

And though it may have been wishful thinking on his part, it sounded as if Jonathan had given him hints as to that mental state. Amidst the shouting and struggles, Bruce had heard "Why can't you tell us apart?" and "That is not my name!" distinctly. It could be remnants of a nightmare, or senseless rambling, but he doubted it. They both seemed to refer to the same point, and if he didn't figure out what that point was, now, he was going to be raving himself.

Jonathan was moving again, trying to push Bruce off. He was unsuccessful, partly because he wasn't using much force and partly because there was no way in hell that Bruce was letting him run off again. "Please let go."

_Yeah, when hell freezes over._ "I can don't that. What were you talking about?"

Jonathan didn't answer, bringing his hands up to his ears as he had so many times as of late. For the first time, Bruce was struck with the realization that the action might not be meant to block _him _out. "Please. Just let go." He pushed against the arms holding him again, once more to no effect.

"I can't." He moved his hands to Jonathan's shoulders, turning his captive to face him. "There is no way I can leave you alone after that. Not until I know what's going on. What were you trying to say?"

"I…" Jonathan refused to meet his eyes, hands still over his ears. He looked pained, but beyond that, distracted. "I—can't we talk about this later?"

"No." His voice was harsher than he intended, and Jonathan flinched, but he refused to back down. He should never have allowed things to get chaotic, and he was not going to let the man leave until the situation was under control, whether that was a matter of minutes or hours. "Tell me what you meant."

"About what?"

"You know what." He said it coldly again, and even without the growl of the Bat-voice, Jonathan shuddered. He stopped responding altogether, covering his face with his hands, and Bruce took his wrists, forcing his arms down. Shielding himself with his hands provided some level of comfort, and while Bruce felt a pang of guilt for taking that away, his concern came second to his need for information. "Tell me what's going on and you can go."

"Go," in this case, could mean either back to bed or back to Arkham, but he thought it best not to elaborate.

Jonathan didn't answer immediately, his eyes moving away from Bruce's and dis-focusing, slightly. He looked as if he was thinking very hard, and in Bruce's experience, whenever Jonathan did that, he found a way to change the subject or get out of the situation very quickly.

"Don't think about it. Just answer. What's wrong with you?"

Jonathan snapped back to attention, his expression changing from pained and confused to panicked. "I—look, I wasn't…" He glanced from side to side, as if seeing his surrounding for the first time. "I wasn't trying to leave—I just…wandered without—" He cut himself off, starting violently and letting a quiet moan escape his mouth.

_Wandered? _Wandered was hardly the term to describe running as if his life depended on it. Whatever was wrong with him, it was either affecting his memory or altering the way he saw the world around him. "What are you talking about?"

"I just _told _you, I—ah." His hands jerked in Bruce's grasp as he tried to bring them up again, to no avail. "Stop yelling."

"I'm not yelling at—" And just like that, things fell into place. The distraction during the conversations, his need to think everything over before he spoke, and the belief that something was shouting at him, something that Bruce had mistakenly taken to mean himself. "Jonathan." No response. "Jonathan." He waited until the man looked at him before continuing. "Who's talking to you, besides me?"

* * *

_Fuck._

Even in times of panic, and even mentally, he didn't swear all that often. At least, not until he became Batman's captive. He would have thought it was Scarecrow's response, at first, had Scarecrow not still been shouting in the back of his mind, having some sort of panic attack.

_Get rid of him get rid of him get rid of him!_

It was loud enough to make him shake. Scarecrow seemed either incapable of understanding or simply uncaring that this was causing Jonathan pain, and making it near impossible to focus his attention on the Bat demanding answers. _Please, _stop _it._

Nothing, beyond more panic. Jonathan couldn't even take the time to calm him down, not now. This was not good, and that was the understatement of the millennium. "I—I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's not true."

"It is." He pushed against Batman's chest, knowing it was a futile effort. Scarecrow hadn't been able to drive him off even with all the adrenaline and anger coursing through him, and there was no way he'd be able to now. Easier just to stop talking.

If only his confusion at waking up in the middle of a hallway and Scarecrow's screaming weren't making shutting up so difficult.

"You just told someone to stop yelling at you, and I know you weren't talking to me. Who were you talking to?"

_Make him go away!_

_I'm trying. _He couldn't do that unless he knew what had happened, so he could lie, but he had no idea, and if he didn't answer quickly enough, Batman was going to shaking him back into paying attention again. He needed Scarecrow to answer. Scarecrow was the one with the skill at lying. But Scarecrow was in no state to answer and apparently unable to compose himself.

"Jonathan."

"Stop—would you—just take me back to Arkham." It was the first and only thing that came to mind. "All right? It's none of your concern. Just take me back to Arkham and let them deal with me there. I don't care about your identity at this point. Let me _leave_."

"What's wrong with you?"

_Goddamn him. _He'd just offered to let himself be removed from the situation, and the Bat responded by further interrogating him. And acting concerned, no less. Had he no shame? "What difference does it make?"

"I'm worried about you."

"You are not."

"Yes, I am. You're acting completely insane, and I don't want you to start hurting yourself again."

Liar. All he wanted was to satisfy his own curiosity. If he was truly concerned, he wouldn't keep pushing when Jonathan was visibly distressed. He was trying to justify that curiosity by pretending to be concerned, and it was as insulting as it was transparent.

The only problem being that it wasn't so transparent.

The concern in his voice sounded genuine, and while Batman would have to be good at feigning interest, considering the social circles he kept, Jonathan didn't think that was the case. It wasn't just that he had no reason to lie—Jonathan had offered to go back, and if he was really curious, he could just demand answers—but something about his behavior. He was acting the way he'd acted all the other times Jonathan had ended up hugging him or explaining something that was better left a secret.

It was hard to tell himself that the Bat didn't actually care, and harder still with Scarecrow panicking. Whatever had happened before Jonathan woke up, it must have been something horrific, to make Batman seem like the better conversation partner in comparison.

_Make him LEAVE._

He felt himself tense from the sound. "Stop it."

"What? What's wrong?"

"I wasn't talking to—" He bit down on his tongue, hard enough to draw blood. _Damn it._ He tried running off again, only to have the Bat hold tighter than ever.

"Who are you talking to?" Batman didn't even sound impatient anymore. Just worried. Hell. It was hard enough having a civil conversation with him _before _the whole being-aroused-by-and-then-kissing Bruce Wayne thing. Add in the trying-to-hide-his-alter-ego-while-said-alter-ego-was-screaming-in-his-mind factor, and it became impossible.

"I'm not—it doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does. Please tell me."

"I _can't._"

"You can." He loosened his grip, though he pulled Jonathan closer. Jonathan wondered if he'd be able to get away now. It didn't matter. He was too exhausted and conflicted to try it. "Friends talk to each other."

_He's not your friend._

"Scarecrow."

"What?"

He realized he'd spoken aloud and nearly screamed from frustration. "N-nothing."

"You said something. What did you say?"

He gave up. There was only so much the mind could take, and this had crossed it. It was exhausting, maddening, and he couldn't put up with it anymore. He didn't think about the long term effects, because he couldn't bring himself to think that far in advance. "Scarecrow. All right?" He let his head fall against Batman's shoulder, completely fatigued. "I'm talking to Scarecrow."

Scarecrow finally fell silent.

"But…" He couldn't see Batman's face, but his voice made the confusion perfectly clear. "You _are_ Scarecrow."

He could have turned it around there, maybe. Salvaged something of the situation by changing the subject, or making an excuse. But he didn't. He was sick of it. And on some level so buried inside he was surprised he could still sense it, he wanted relief. This was too much, and for once he was willing to admit it. "No, I'm not. Scarecrow's a part of me, but he has his own consciousness. And that's who I was talking to."

It was then that Scarecrow started screaming again, and louder than ever.


	47. Try to Understand

AN: "Schadenfreude" is German for "happiness at the misfortune of others."

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bruce had no idea how to respond to that.

He imagined this was a lighter version of how the Allied forces must have felt when they first went into the concentration camps. The veterans who'd been there spoke of a complete shock at what they'd seen, and an inability to comprehend what they were taking in. A camp where the prisoners were forced to work was hardly a new invention, but they'd never seen such horrific conditions, and the concept was so foreign to them that they could hardly process it.

Bruce felt himself experiencing a much, much milder version of that type of shock. It wasn't that the idea of Jonathan hallucinating was something new to him. He'd expected that from the beginning. The responses that in no way corresponded with what Bruce had said, the mood swings, the way he'd start off at nothing mid-sentence and fail to respond. They were all ways he'd acted under psychosis—though the mood swings, not so much—but on a lesser scale.

He'd expected that the medication wasn't working fully, and Jonathan was experiencing a lesser version of madness. Something like that, he was prepared for.

He was _not_, however, prepared for the idea that Jonathan's hallucinations had a structure, or that there was any sort of consistency to the man's fantasy world. Hearing voices was one thing. Hearing one voice with a personality—and not only a personality, but one that he viewed as an extension of himself—that he carried on conversations with was quite another. Why it made such a difference, Bruce wasn't sure, but it did. Maybe it was because the madness he'd witnessed from Jonathan had always been random, and structured insanity was something he was accustomed to from the Joker.

It didn't help matters that Jonathan talked about this hallucination like he'd had it for years, possibly even for the entire duration of his toxin-induced psychosis. The fact that he'd been able to hide that from the Arkham psychiatrists and everyone else for so long, even at times when he'd completely lost contact with reality, was chilling, and begged the question of what else he might have managed to hide.

This, he'd never imagined, and he had no idea how to deal with it.

It didn't help the situation in the slightest when Jonathan went completely limp, tearing his hands out of Bruce's grasp and bringing them to his ears as he sank to the floor, moaning.

_Hell. _But at least he had some understanding of this aspect of the insanity. Jonathan had collapsed to the ground or other nearest surface during his latest bout of psychosis, either too relaxed by the sedatives or too frightened by his hallucinations to move.

He knelt down beside him, stroking the man's hair from his face. "Jonathan?"

Jonathan's eyes moved toward him before he cringed, breathing in sharply. "Too loud," he muttered, and Bruce could tell from his gaze that he wasn't the one being addressed. He wasn't even sure if Jonathan was seeing him or not.

He sat on the floor, taking Jonathan into his arms. It had helped during the full-blown psychosis, and he hoped it would help now. "What's too loud?" He was struck by how pale Jonathan looked, and hoped he wouldn't be vomited on again. Though, really, that was the least of his worries now.

Jonathan shook his head, rubbing at his temples. If the action had any effect, helpful or otherwise, Bruce couldn't discern it.

"Is…"Scarecrow" hurting you?" It occurred to Bruce that encouraging the hallucination was unlikely to be beneficial to the man's mental state, but he had no idea how else to figure out what was going on. It could end up doing more damage, but then, he was just as likely to cause damage if he avoided the issue and tried to go on as normal.

At this point, he wasn't sure there was more damage to be done.

Jonathan didn't answer, still staring into the distance. If it were for the fact that his eyes were moving and that he occasionally flinched, Bruce would have thought he'd gone catatonic.

"Jonathan?"

He shivered, shaking his head again, either unable or unwilling to focus on the voice that wasn't coming from inside his head.

Bruce lifted him into a sitting position, gently turning his head to face him. "Jonathan." He waited until widened eyes focused on him to speak again. "What's he doing to hurt you?"

"Y—yelling." He had to choke the word out. Whatever was going on inside, it had to be agony. At least it was only shouting, though, as opposed to imaginary blows.

"Why is he angry?"

He didn't answer, already distracted. "That's not true…I'm not—don't say that."

"Jonathan." He tried not to be loud, a difficult task when it came attracting the attention of a hallucinating person. This was entirely beyond him. He felt every bit as lost as he had last February, when Jonathan had mutilated himself with a nail gun, and whatever he'd learned from that experience didn't seem to be applicable here. Then, his objective had been to subdue. Now, it was to gain information, and he was lost all over again.

"He hates you," Jonathan muttered, managing to glance at Bruce before looking elsewhere.

Bruce tried to prioritize the multitude of questions racing through his mind, and make things simpler for the both of them. His meds clearly weren't covering all the symptoms. The question was to what extent the hallucinations had come back. What had he seen the last time he'd lost it. "All right, so Scarecrow hates me. What about the birds? Are they back?"

Jonathan struggled to keep his gaze on Bruce. "What?"

"The birds." He wasn't sure how explaining would help. It wasn't as if Jonathan could separate fantasy from reality in such a state. "Because you saw them when you ran out of medicine and started hallucinating, the last time—"

"Not hallucinating." Jonathan was focused on him now, brows creased in confusion as opposed to pain. "He's not—he's always there."

"Always?" Hell. Hearing voices was a bad sign, but a voice that antipsychotics didn't touch? That was an ill omen if ever he'd heard one.

"Always. Before you poisoned me…he's real. You've met him."

"What?" _Shit._ If by "always," he meant his entire life, Bruce got a feeling his mental illness had just gotten a hell of a lot more severe. Which, considering the man in question, was quite an accomplishment. Not to mention the fact that he let the hallucination speak through him, if Bruce had correctly understood him.

Well, that explained the mood swings.

Jonathan didn't answer, slumping forward and whimpering quietly in pain. With no idea of where to begin dealing with this, Bruce did the first thing that came to mind: picking him up and carrying him into the bedroom.

* * *

_You stupid little _bastard_._

_Stop it!_ Jonathan was vaguely aware that he was being carried—and he only knew that because Scarecrow wanted to kick and was fighting for control—but he couldn't bring himself to care, either about his location or Batman's reaction to all of this. The pain Scarecrow was causing him overshadowed it.

_What, you expect me to do what you say after you've brushed me aside? After you've told the Bat _everything_? Fuck you._

_Stop yelling. _Somewhere under his self-disgust and misery, he felt anger. It was Scarecrow's fault that he'd revealed it to begin with, for screaming nonstop until Jonathan had been unable to function, let alone keep secrets.

_Don't tell me what to do, you worthless fucking traitor. You make me sick._

His head was pounding, stomach churning from worry and guilt. _You're hurting me._

_GOOD. You hurt me first. I never thought your great-grandmother was right about you being a soulless abomination, but now? Not so sure._

_Stop!_ He felt tears in his eyes, stinging, and he didn't want to let them out but he was unable to control it, and there was water sliding down his face as Scarecrow continued to shout and the Bat laid him on the bed, shaking his shoulder until he forced himself to look up at the man. "What?"

_Don't talk to him!_

"Have you unpacked anything?"

Jonathan stared. The question was unexpected enough to silence Scarecrow, if only for a few seconds, and also far enough out of left field to stun him into silence.

"Besides the clothes you have on," Batman clarified. "Have you taken anything else out of the boxes?"

He racked his mind, a harder task than it should have been now that Scarecrow had regained his lung capacity. "I—I don't think so…"

_Stop answering! Attention-whoring slut._

"Okay." The Bat walked to the nearest box, folding the top flaps over each other to seal it. Jonathan struggled to sit up, before deciding that sitting would take too much effort, and it would be far easier to just roll over for a better look, which he did.

"What are you doing?" He ignored Scarecrow's shriek at that one, as best he could.

"Getting your things together. So I can take you back."

"_What_?!" And suddenly he was sitting up, heart pounding in his chest as he tried to block out Scarecrow's laughter.

Batman didn't look up. "I have no idea how to take care of you. You need professional help."

"No!" He tried to stand and ending up falling off the bed, knees stinging from the impact. Scarecrow was still laughing and, too pained, terrified, and angry to deal with it, Jonathan gathered his resolve and shut their mental link.

Immediately, he felt Scarecrow's mood shift from schadenfreude to fury, but he didn't have to hear the screaming, for once, and that reduced the torment to a bearable level almost at once. "No no no no!" He forced himself up, crossed to Batman. "You can't take me back!"

"Yes, I can." The Bat looked up at him, his expression a mix of pity and something else, possibly resolve. "It's not helping you to be here. If anything, it's making you worse."

"No!" He dropped onto his knees again, ignoring the pain of impact, and grabbed Batman's arm, clinging with all the force he had. "I'll tell everyone your secret!"

"Honestly?" The Bat tried pushing him off, but he refused to be budged. "I really doubt that they'd believe you in a state like this. Jonathan—"

"NO." He felt the Batman cringe, recognized that sound was the exact torture Scarecrow had used on him, and got the sense that he ought to feel badly about it. He didn't. At this point, anything that kept him from going back to Arkham would be worth it, humane or not.

Living here was god-awful. He was a prisoner, allowed not even so much as fresh air, and tagged like an animal. He was the captive of the man who had ruined his life, with only said man and his indifferent butler for company. Being here was driving a rift between himself and the person he most cared about in the world, the person who was quite literally his soul mate, and with whom grudges should be impossible to hold. He was told when to eat, and what he could and couldn't do, and Batman had no issue with picking him up and dragging him from place to place.

But it was still better than life in Arkham.

And truth be told, he did not want to leave Batman. The man had poisoned him, imprisoned him, and was trying to get rid of him even as he struggled to stay, but all of that was secondary to the fact that, for whatever reason, he did not want to leave the Bat's side. He actually seemed to care, much as all evidence pointed to the contrary, and for reasons he couldn't explain—sexual attraction, possibly—Jonathan felt safer here than he ever had in the asylum.

"Jonathan, this is for the—"

"Please." He clung with renewed fervor, the Bat's free hand utterly ineffectual at moving him away. "_Please._ I want to stay. I won't yell anymore, or try to run. I'll cooperate, I swear. I'll be quiet. Just don't take me back to Arkham." He was begging and it disgusted him, every bit as much as the tears still streaking down his face, but he couldn't bring himself to stop. "Let me stay here. I'll behave, I'll do anything, just let me _stay_."

There was a long, horrible pause.

_He's going to say no, _Jonathan realized with a nauseated, sinking feeling. _He's going to say no. He's going to take me back and—_

His thoughts were cut short when Batman picked him up without warning, carrying him to the bed and laying him down. He stepped back, sighed, and shook his head. "I'm going to regret this."


	48. Der Blaubeermund

AN: The odds of there being an update tomorrow are very, very low, as I've got homework, a night class, two shifts, and the thirty-first happens to be my twentieth birthday.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"_Mein Herz steht still an diesem Tag_."

The Joker twisted the electrical cord of the ear phones around his fingers, winding and unwinding. In his other hand he held the light green MP3 player the ear phones connected to, the one that he'd stolen from Abigail's pocket the previous night when she'd been standing by the bed to bring him dinner. She hadn't noticed.

He wasn't sure if he'd give it back when she did notice. On the one hand, taunting her with it would be good for some amusement—he knew he could make the struggle last for a while despite being immobilized—but her taste in music was nothing like his.

"…_in deinen wunderschönen Augen schimmert kaltes Neonlicht wie Sterne am Firmament…_"

He assumed it was nothing like his, anyway. Most of her music was foreign, but only a small amount of that was in French, and all the French he'd come across was classical, though that may have been a result of playing randomly instead of using her folders. Her more modern music, so far, was mostly comprised of German, and the only German song he understood was "99 Luftballoons."

Which she actually had, and he'd already listened to, but that was beside the point. The point was, all her music tended towards either bouncy and happy-sounding, or soft and pretty. And while he could take either of those in small concentrations, if it went on for long it had better be soft and pretty music about eviscerating CEOS, or something similarly violent, or it couldn't hope to hold his attention.

Whatever he was listening to now could well be about that sort of thing. But he had no way of knowing.

"_Dein Blaubeermund so kühl so zart…_"

The Joker found himself chewing on the scars inside his mouth. Briefly, he wondered if he could open them back up, how much blood there would be if he did, and how long and amusing the panic of his caretakers would be Adrian got out the needle and thread and stitched him back together. Probably it wouldn't be funny enough to justify the effort, especially considering that he couldn't feel pain in the scars. If it hurt, it would much more entertaining.

Boredom did not suit the Joker.

"…_in deiner Schönheit aus Eis, dein estarrtes Antlitz…_"

He was becoming…tame, almost. Going from a mad dog to a house pet. People forgot that dogs descended from wolves, and that deep with every fluffy little lapdog there was some trace of the beautiful, powerful, and deadly creatures . Not so say that dogs couldn't be deadly as well—there were enough stories about mauled children attesting to that to write a novel—but unless people came face to face with a rabid pit bull, they tended to think of dogs as man's best friend.

Most of those same people would at least feel their hearts quicken at the sight of a wolf.

And wolves did not lie around listening to Germanic techno-ballads on stolen MP3 players. Mad dogs didn't sit there watching news programs and hoping for mentions of the Batman. And any self-respecting canine would refuse to let a pair of bored girls steal his gloves for long enough to paint his fingernails, traction or not.

He really needed to kill them for that. As soon as he could get up. They'd try to justify it by calling it a manicure—"You need one. When was the last time you cut your nails?"—and using clear polish, but that hardly won them any favors with him. Manicures were for rich, spoiled playboys like Bruce Wayne, not for agents of chaos, or any sort of dog that didn't compete in shows.

He felt his stomach churn at the reminder. Bruce Wayne.

"_Ich gestehe…verzeih mir…ich streif das Tuch von dir…_"

Bruce Wayne. He needed to just…die, as slowly and painfully as possible. He was the last shred of morality that spoiled everything and kept the Batman insisting that he and the Joker were human. He was the one who had pushed the Joker to the breaking point in the cave, trapped him in the dark and actually made him c_ry_, and he was the one who had kept the infiltration of the Batman's home from being the best experience in the history of the earth, as it should have been, and instead made it outright painful.

Bruce Wayne had to die.

There was just the small matter of how to do that without destroying Batman as well.

Someone knocked on the door. "Jackie?"

He pulled the ear phones out, cutting off any lyrics that might have followed "_Ohh…ich liebe dich_"—which, judging from the accompanying music, was a last line anyway—and stopped the music, sliding the contraption into his coat pocket. He'd only been listening for half an hour, and for all he knew there could be something of value on it yet. "What?"

"Lunch." Anika pushed open the door, carrying a plate of stir fry. The rice in the concoction had been covered with blue food coloring, by the look of it, presumably because she'd figured out what the Arkham staff and most of his henchman—with the sole exception of Thomas Schiff—had never picked up on. Namely, the fact that the Joker would eat anything placed in front of him without complaint, provided it was cut small enough for him to eat, if it was brightly colored enough to attract his attention. "How are you?"

He attempted to say "terrible," but he wasn't sure if it was intelligible, given that he'd just put a forkful in his mouth at the same time.

Anika stared at him in the way one might stare at a puppy who'd just soiled the carpet. "Do those scars make it impossible to close your mouth when you chew, or are you just like that?"

He thought about pointing out that she was allowing a mass murderer to live in her home, and going so far as to cook for him, so getting offended over his lack of etiquette was really more than a bit ridiculous, but that would take effort. So he just shoved another forkful into his mouth and chewed.

"You look unhappy."

He took a water chestnut from the plate and threw it at her. Unfortunately, water chestnuts, particularly when sliced, were not the sort of thing that carried far when thrown, and rather than smacking her across the face, it fell onto the bedspread, much less dramatically than he would have liked. "I don't do well in captivity, remember?"

She sat down beside him, putting the water chestnut back on an empty part of his plate and adjusting his pillow. "It's only for a few more weeks, you know."

"And it won't take a few weeks for me to hang myself with this tie." He smacked her hand away when she reached over to remove it. "Don't even think about it."

"I can get you a book."

"I've read all the books in this hellhole. Even the medical texts." Which had been surprisingly entertaining as well as informative. He wasn't sure when a situation that called for, say, an appendectomy or a castration would occur, but he'd been ready if it did.

"I can rent you a movie? As long as it's not…adult," she added hastily, raising her hand as if to silence a request he hadn't been about to make. "'Gail went on and on about the last time she walked in on you polishing your one-eyed purple people pleaser, so I don't—"

He threw the water chestnut again, and this time it did hit her shoulder. Unfortunately, without leaving a stain. "Does no one in this apartment say "masturbation" or something? It's annoying as hell."

Anika wiped the nonexistent soy sauce from her shirt. "Are you still mad because she called you small?"

"She said average." He threw a bean sprout that time.

"Average at best. And stop throwing food or I'll just start pureeing everything and spoon-feeding you. Without food coloring."

"Do you have a death wish?" It occurred to the Joker that he was going to have to grievously injure at least one of them once he regained mobility, both for seeing him in such a vulnerable state and for mocking him this way. Anika was the obvious choice, as she was the only one who didn't provide a service. Well, cooking, but anyone with a recipe book and common sense could do that.

He got the feeling that hurting her would lose him the other two, though. As would hurting Abigail. Adrian, on the other hand, would probably view any injury that didn't cause permanent harm as a necessary evil of working with the Joker, and prefer the money over avoiding pain. And as the unofficial leader of the triad, his sisters would do as he said.

So the question was what injury to inflict, and where.

"No, I don't. What do you want?"

He ate the last bit of rice and handed the plate back to her, picking up the Batman doll. He gave an experimental tug on the mask and found that it was sewn on, impossible to remove.

It was much better that way.

"I can't get him." Anika pointed to the doll. If he remembered correctly, Abigail had sewn the thing but she had done the detail paint of the armor. For a recreation made of cotton cloth and based on blurred photographs, it was surprisingly well done. "I don't think he'd take kindly to Adrian's profession. Or the whole aiding and abetting a criminal thing."

"Some friend you are."

"How would I get his attention anyway?" She leaned back against the pillows, running the fabric of the doll's cape between her fingers.

"Dress in spandex and hold up a, uh, gas station. Or something. If it's completely overblown and ridiculous, and the sun's set, there's a good chance he'll be there."

"I'd rather not risk being shot by a panicked cashier."

The Joker sighed, and gave her a pointed glare which she didn't even have the decency to notice. "It doesn't matter. He's no fun lately anyway."

"What's wrong, Jackie?" She shifted to her left, resting her head against his shoulder in a gesture that was meant to be friendly and comforting. He tried smacking her across the face and hit the hearing aid instead. It made her head bounce back, but it also caused mild pain to his hand, not agonizing enough to really be pleasurable.

"I need to kill him."

"Batman?"

He reached over and pushed her off the bed, smirking at the sound of impact and relishing the fact that the floors weren't carpeted. He waited until she pulled herself back up to continue. "No, you idiot. The one under the mask."

She stared, forehead creasing as she took that in. "Then…you know who that is?"

"No shit," he muttered, without moving his lips and softly enough that she couldn't hear him. "I could tell you," he said, louder, "but then I'd have to tear your vocal cords out. And you'd probably choke to death on the blood during the procedure."

"I'd have a bigger scar than you."

"Who said I'd stitch you back up when I was finished?"

There was a flicker of fear in her eyes at that, which cemented his decision not to grievously harm her. "So…you want to kill his human side?"

"Did I stutter?"

She began to roll her eyes before wisely deciding against it. "Wouldn't that…kill the Batman?"

"No."

She got that irritatingly blank expression his psychiatrists and henchmen so often wore. "But—"

"I don't mean physically kill him, genius. I mean, uh, destroy his mind a little. I do it all the time. Where have you been?" Of course, he'd never done it to Batsy before, and Bruce Wayne had shown an annoying resistance to all of his usual mindscrew techniques.

Still, it was just a matter of persistence. Hopefully.

"Couldn't you end up…" She paused, apparently trying to phrase it delicately. "Destroying the Bat side a little bit too?"

"No."

"But—"

"You're talking to me. The Joker. The one who brought out all of Harvey Dent's inner darkness and turned him from white knight to crazed killer."

She bit her lower lip, and motioned as if to brush her hair behind her ears, though it was far too short to do that. "Have you ever heard the story of the golden goose?"

"Have you ever heard the story of the little girl who bothered the big, scary clown with too many questions?"

Anika sat up and picked the plate up from the quilt under her. "Last question then. Do you know if Abigail laid her MP3 player somewhere around here? She can't find it anywhere."

"No," he said, pulling the device from his pocket and putting the earphones back in.

She shook her head. "Whatever."

"You're not gonna demand it back?"

"At this point, it's not worth the effort it would take to get it. Besides, you're enjoying it, aren't you? You guys have similar tastes."

"We do?" He held it up, glancing through the folders. Hey, she had Tom Waits.

"But she's not going to be happy when she catches you with that."

"Or, she could just be relieved that I didn't masturbate on it too."

She smiled, shook her head again, and walked out.

* * *

AN: The song in this chapter is "Der Blaubeermund," by E Nomine. It's a German techno-ballad with a very pretty—if somewhat ominous sound—and it's about a mortuary worker singing praises to a corpse in the morgue. For added mood whiplash, "blaubeermund" is German for "blueberry mouth." Yeah. The lines in the chapter are, in order: "my heart stands still on this day," "in your gorgeous eyes shimmers cold neon light like the stars in heaven," "your blueberry mouth, so cool, so soft," "in your icy beauty, your firm countenance," "I admit…forgive me…I strip the cloth off you…" and "Ohhh…I love you." Yes, it's on Youtube.

Tom Waits is a musician with a voice that could make Happy Birthday sound like a death threat, and has in fact made the song "Heigh Ho" (Yes, from Snow White) sound horrifying. My favorite sound of his is "What's He Building in There?" for sheer paranoia value. Both are on Youtube.


	49. Why

AN: So for my first birthday away from home, that was actually rather good. The working and class parts not so much, but everything else was nice, particularly when the weather wasn't sweltering for once. And today my roommate decided to randomly buy me a Joker T-shirt and a Harley one, though she already got me a gift. So yeah, she rocks.

Also, while I love my TDK calendar, and I very much liked the Harvey and Rachel in the courtroom picture for August, I am a little disappointed that the Scarecrow month was September, with my birthday one day too soon to fall in his month.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"Can you…see him?" Bruce asked, at a loss for anything else to say.

Jonathan stopped pacing around the room for long enough to glare.

The digital clock on the microwave read four sixteen AM. The clock on the oven matched it. They'd been there for over forty minutes, and there was no indication that they'd be out of here any time soon. Bruce's intention when he'd put Jonathan on the bed had been to leave him there, and get some sleep himself, so as to be able to work this out better when his mind wasn't clouded with fatigue. Obviously, it hadn't taken.

Less than a minute later, it had occurred to them that Bruce had neglected to give him the antipsychotics after the "come back tomorrow and I'll tell you then" conversation, which had brought them to the kitchen for water. That should have taken two minutes at the most, but somehow they'd ended up like this, with Bruce sitting at the table and Jonathan unable to sit still, pacing back and forth, occasionally drinking from the cup of coffee in his hand. He hated coffee, as he made a point of mentioning every time he drank, and yet he still had it. The confession had drained him, it would seem, and Bruce couldn't say that he found that surprising.

"No. He's a part of me. What is so hard to understand about that?"

_Everything?_ Bruce didn't claim to be an expert of psychology. He recognized that Jonathan Crane had a greater insight into the human mind than he would ever had, despite how fractured the ex-doctor's own was. Even with his understanding of the criminal mind and their prior encounters, he was just dipping into the waters, as this latest revelation proved. But from what he knew of psychology, the waking self could not be aware of a split personality.

From what he understood, dissociative identity disorder was caused by trauma, and the personality splintered to defend the original from the horrible circumstances. So unless the Jonathan he'd been dealing with was also a splintered personality, and the real Dr. Crane was completely suppressed, the "Scarecrow" couldn't be an actual entity.

Even in a place like Gotham, he refused to entertain possession as a possibility.

Which left, unless there was another condition he was overlooking, a hallucination. And given that he had a hallucinating problem to begin with, it wasn't that much of a stretch.

"Sorry. Just—you keep glancing to the side." And he did. Every so often, there would be the faintest of looks to the left. Bruce had thought of it as a nervous tic before, but now he found himself second guessing every motion Jonathan made, wondering if there was a deeper significance. Considering how well he'd hidden his "other half"—at least, until the past few days—there very well could be.

"He does not exist outside of me. He has no separate physical presence." He stopped pacing long enough to set the cup on the counter, closing his mouth tightly as if to indicate that he wasn't discussing this any longer. And then ruining that, less than five seconds later, by blurting out "I'm looking in the direction that the sound of his voice comes from and even though it comes from within me it's still toward the back," all in one breath.

He'd been doing that quite a bit over the last forty minutes. Either it was a sign of returning psychosis, or he'd wanted to vent about this for a long, long time. Bruce hoped it was the latter, and decided against commenting.

Jonathan glared at him for a moment longer, before drinking, his mouth twitching a bit as he swallowed. "I hate coffee."

"Do you want something e—"

"No."

So he was every bit as unhelpful when he was being open as when he was guarding the truth. Good to know. "And…how long has this…Scarecrow…been around?"

Jonathan pushed his glasses up, to glare more effectively. "Would you stop treating me like a crazy person?"

Once again, Bruce refrained from comment.

"He's been around for the entirety of my life. There has never been a time when he hasn't been there. And you've met him, you idiot. Did "Dr. Crane isn't here right now?" mean nothing to you?"

He decided that there was a time and a place for a "friends don't call friends idiots" discussion, and it was not in the early hours of the morning in his kitchen. "I didn't realize you were speaking literally."

"_I _wasn't speaking. He was. Did I not just say that?" Jonathan set the cup down again and ran a hand through his hair, which was already tousled from his sudden inability to leave it alone. "Christ, I could use a cigarette."

"You smoke?"

"No." He held the hems of his sleeves in his hands, rolling them back and forth in agitation. "But I believe this would be the perfect opportunity to start."

Bruce, who still shuddered to think of what the caffeine he was taking in could do to his system, imagined adding nicotine into the chemical cocktail that was Jonathan's blood stream and shivered. "I doubt Alfred would want cigarettes in the house." He paused out of habit, waiting for a smart remark. Nothing. Unsure of whether to take the silence as a good or bad sign, he went on. "Is he talking to you right now?"

"No. He won't talk at all now. He's cut me off entirely." He stopped pacing again, this time in front of the table, and sat, winding his hands through his hair. He was pale and wide-eyed and looked like he needed a good night's sleep more than anything else, but Bruce doubted there was any likelihood of that happening in the near future. Not in the state he was in.

"Isn't that a good thing?" He tried to ask it as gently as he could, and as calmly, but any intended comfort had missed its mark, judging from the look Jonathan gave him when he raised his head.

"_No._" His eyes burned with an angry light that Bruce had first seen a few days prior, when Jonathan—or, what Bruce now assumed was the "other half"—had pulled away on the couch and demanded that Bruce let go of him. It said something for the intensity of that glare, that it could still be intimidating even after Bruce had seem its owner as a sobbing, codependent mess. "No, Batman. It is not a good thing. I know this is a difficult concept for you to grasp—though I can't for the life of me see _why_—but he is my counterpart. The other half to my mind—or my soul, if you'd rather—and I happen to like him quite a lot."

_It's difficult to grasp because it's completely ludicrous. _He resisted the urge to sigh. "Even when he's screaming at you?"

"Everyone argues at some point or another. Particularly when they live in close proximity."

_Not everyone has shouting matches with the voice in their head severely enough to impede their ability to stand up._ There was no point. It wasn't worth getting into. And to be honest, none of this was.

Bringing the villains into the cave had been bad enough. Into the manor was even worse. And allowing Jonathan Crane to stay even when he was raving mad and no one would have taken his claims about Bruce's identity seriously was stupid beyond words. But telling him he could stay after learning that his mental condition was even worse than it had originally seemed—and that was no small task—crossed the line from idiotic into dangerous.

For the life of him, he couldn't figure out what had possessed him to tell Jonathan he could stay. He'd known, even as he said it, that it was a terrible idea, and one that could only come back to bite him in the worst possible way at the least opportune moment. Even as he was listening to Jonathan's occasional outbursts and watching him wander aimlessly and ceaselessly, the back of his mind was reminding him of all the ways the situation could and would go wrong. And he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Alfred would waste no effort in reminding him of all the things he'd forgotten, in the morning.

To say that he regretted it would be an absolute understatement. And yet he had to admit that, if given the choice again, he would be still be conflicted.

Jonathan Crane, physically, was not intimidating. But physical strength could be outclassed by psychotic energy, and while Jonathan was far more lucid than he had been in the previous weeks, he could hardly be considered stable. Especially with this latest issue coming into the light. It didn't matter that all the weapons in the house were secured; to someone desperate enough, anything could be a weapon. And broken as the man was, it didn't diminish his genius. He didn't need a weapon to do damage, if he was so inclined.

It wasn't that he was underestimating the danger of the situation. That hadn't left his mind, even for a moment. But somehow, it seemed secondary.

Secondary to what, he wasn't quite sure. The constant torment from the depths of Jonathan's own mind, perhaps. The way he could go from seeing completely unhinged to completely rational, if unpleasant, within seconds, and vice versa, with apparently no control over the shifts. He was dangerous, yes, but at the same time, almost helpless. His utter insanity didn't absolve him of his crimes, but it did lend a sympathy Bruce couldn't help but feel, despite knowing better.

Why that was, he wasn't sure, but he suspected it had something to do with the man's almost unnaturally blue, wide eyes. They were almost a defense mechanism, and they had an uncanny ability to make him look innocent and defenseless, even when all the evidence proved otherwise. It leant humanity to him that his actions alone would have left lacking.

He shook his head. It did nothing to clear his fatigue, or make any more sense of the decision he'd made. Maybe things would be clearer in the morning. For everyone's sake, he hoped so.

"What?" Jonathan demanded, and he realized he'd been staring at the man's aforementioned eyes for the duration of his reverie.

"Nothing." He pushed the chair back, and stood. "Look, I'm exhausted. Can we just…not deal with this now?"

Jonathan stared, eyes narrowing. "You're not going to demand information and refuse to leave until I give it?"

That stung more than it should have, probably due to exhaustion. He shook it off, resolving not to give any more thought to the matter until he'd had sleep. Around twelve hours of it, preferably. "No. No, I'm not. Good night."

"Batman?"

He paused in the doorway, and turned back around. "Bruce."

Jonathan, a meter or so behind him, crossed his arms, looking away. "Batman."

"Bruce."

"Ba—why did you let me stay?"

"Do you _want _to go back?" he asked, knowing it wouldn't be that easy, no matter how much he wished it.

"I—no."

"Well then. Why don't you just take comfort in the fact that I didn't, instead of worrying about the justification for it?"

He uncrossed his arms, though he didn't look up. "I hardly find that reassuring."

Bruce shrugged, and started out of the room. "Right now? It's the best I can give you."


	50. Forces

AN: So today I received a birthday gift in the form of a fan art from the wonderful dididouli, which can be seen here: dididouli. deviantart. com/ art/ Scarecrow-Shadow-Selves-135636515 Check it out!

I would also like to add that I was raised without any sort of video game system and have gone through life being perfectly happy with the fact that I've never played a video game—though I always thought _Portal _looked fantastic—until _Arkham Asylum _came out and I started watching the game footage on Youtube. There aren't words to describe my love for the game's Scarecrow. I mean, he has hypodermic syringes of toxin affixed to the fingers of his glove, like Freddy Krueger in a burlap mask. I can't really comment on the fights against him, as I've no experience in that area, but the hallucinations leading up to them are _fantastically _creepy, particularly the one for his final battle. I never thought it would be possible to upstage Mark Hamill's Joker, but from what I've heard, a fair amount of fans think the Scarecrow's managed that.

For anyone interested, someone's uploaded a video of the Scarecrow's Arkham session interviews here: www. youtube. com/ watch?v=OypvpcOLcMw And yes, that is the Scarecrow who speaks first. He sounds vaguely like Sterling Holloway, which apparently leads to confusion for some people as to who he's voicing. Also, Batman cameo for the win.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Sometimes it sucked to be the active force.

It was a comparison the Joker had used, almost a year ago, to highlight the differences between himself and Jonathan. The Joker caused things to happen, in contrast to Jonathan, who preferred to sit back and observe. The Joker had told him this the night they escaped Arkham together, and Scarecrow wasn't sure why he remembered it. That was during the time period where he preferred to ignore the Joker, but he'd been paying attention that night, out of curiosity as to what the clown was planning.

He wondered how much of that conversation Jonathan remembered. Scarecrow tended to be better at recalling human interactions—aside from the negative ones, which had been burned into both memories rather badly—whereas Jonathan was better with facts and statistics. But if it was person he had emotional ties to, they were about equal.

The Joker hadn't included Scarecrow in the metaphor. Scarecrow had barely interacted with him at that time, aside from a failed attempt at beating him to death for what had looked like an assault against Harley. Not that he particularly cared for Harley, but Jonathan did, and between an ex-psychiatrist and the Clown Prince of Crime, he'd pick the shrink every time. Anyway, Scarecrow in his present state had barely existed at that point. The toxin overexposure had broken Jonathan enough to allow the shifts in control by then, but it had taken a long, long time before Jonathan stopped resisting the change. Then, Scarecrow had been suppressed, and only allowed to take control when the situation was too much to handle. Then, they'd barely conversed. Scarecrow had been little more than a glorified imaginary friend, for all the sway he held.

He would rather die than go back to that.

The metaphor had worked for more than just the Joker and Jonathan, however. It applied to Scarecrow and Jonathan every bit as well. Scarecrow was the one who'd given Jonathan the resolve to use the toxin for the first time. He was the one who pushed, because there was no one else in his other half's life to offer support. And he was the one who felt everything Jonathan repressed, and said everything Jonathan held back. Scarecrow was blunt where Jonathan was subtle and Scarecrow was vocal where Jonathan was silent. Usually, the dynamic worked well.

But usually, he wasn't going head to head against himself.

Jonathan—well, he didn't quite _like _it, but whenever Scarecrow reached his breaking point and had a nice, cathartic shouting fit at someone who deserved it, and the outburst didn't lead to a beating, Jonathan was grateful. He hid it under his "completely unnecessary" and "do you enjoy making a spectacle of yourself?" style complaints, but he was relieved to lessen the stress as well.

Unfortunately, it didn't work that way when Scarecrow's anger was directed inward. Something he'd been enraged enough to forget until the damage had been done. He argued with Jonathan all the time, but only on rare occasions was it serious. He'd forgotten, in the wake of his joy at returning and his distrust of the Bat, just how damaging the serious arguments could be.

He could sense, now that he'd calmed down enough to take it in, the distress he'd caused Jonathan. And while it was partly Jonathan's fault for his own stupidity, he'd done himself no favors by losing control like he had. If anything, he'd pushed his other half into revealing more.

_But he did deserve it…_

He would have shaken his head, had he been in control. It didn't work as a thought-clearing gesture unless he could actually do it, for whatever reason. Jonathan was far too naïve, far too trusting, and he was going to get them into serious danger, even more serious than they were now, if he didn't learn when to silence himself.

They said that one caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. Scarecrow had always been of the mind that a flyswatter worked the best, but harshness had clearly failed as an approach, and if he pushed any harder, he ran the risk of losing his other half entirely.

Fine. For Jonathan, he could be comforting. That was his purpose for existence, after all. To keep Jonathan safe. Mostly from the world outside, but increasingly, from his own infuriating idiocy.

He took a moment to breath, and bury the irritation and tension he couldn't make himself release. Their emotional link was still open—he'd left it that way as a punishment, to let his other half know his feelings, even in silence—but it would hardly help the conversation if he started off observably pissed.

_I can do this. I have to do this._

Scarecrow refused to entertain the possibility of failure. Jonathan was his, and no playboy vigilante could change that, no matter how sincere his smile seemed, how resourceful he was in finding ways around Jonathan's defenses, how compassionate he could make his eyes, or how good it had felt to be pinned down to the bed by him, even with the panic—

_No. Absolutely not. _He thought back to the time he'd overheard the Joker and Harley in the throes of passion and focused on that, until arousal was the furthest thing from his mind. _Enough. It doesn't matter how many tricks he has up his sleeve. He can't come between us._

He just hoped, with all he had, that Jonathan didn't want an explanation for the arousal during the argument the day prior.

* * *

He was lying on the bed, staring at the wall. How long he'd been awake, he wasn't sure. Judging from the light he could see through the shade, it was morning, so he'd fallen asleep, but he didn't remember when and he had no clock to indicate the time.

He felt exhausted.

It was odd, how different even the walls of a wealthy home could be. The white wainscoting and the cream painted walls above it were obviously a far cry from the painted cinderblocks of Arkham Asylum, but he'd never realized how aged and cheap the drywall of his last apartment looked in comparison. The family manor in Georgia had been wallpapered, but the paper was faded and peeling with age, uneven and wrinkled in spots from water damage, and the chair rails scratched and dented. Wayne Manor was what he'd imagined other kids lived like, in his early childhood, the sort of place he wanted to go when his mother finally took him away from his great-grandmother forever, as he'd dreamed.

That fantasy had ended some time in kindergarten. Fantasies weren't something he'd ever held onto for long, even as a small child. As far back as that, he'd been disillusioned. There was no better life but what he made for himself, and he'd done a spectacularly awful job at that, as his present situation indicated.

_Jonathan?_

He flinched involuntarily, and instantly felt Scarecrow embracing him, stroking his hair back from his face. The fact that Scarecrow had no physical presence and his hair didn't move at all didn't make the gesture any less real. He wondered if Batman would understand that, and doubted it.

_It's all right. _He thought he heard remorse in Scarecrow's voice, but he wasn't sure. _It's all right. I promise I'm done yelling._

_For now._ He felt himself cringe again. Why he felt the need to provoke people even when repeat trials had proven it a bad idea, he wasn't sure. Yet it never seemed like a bad move until he'd already done it.

_Shh. _The embrace tightened, accompanied by the sensation of Scarecrow resting his head on Jonathan's shoulder. Odd how the voice came from straight inside his mind, but the sensations were always independent of his bodily constraints. Stranger still how he'd felt them even before the toxin had caused a true schism, albeit not as strongly. _I deserved that._

_Yes. You did. _Talking back, considering recent circumstances, made him nauseous and increased his heart rate, but he refused to back down this time. Scarecrow had his best interests at heart, and he knew that, but the mental screaming had been torture, borderline abuse, and he refused to take it any longer. _What did you think you were going to achieve?_

_I wasn't thinking._

_That's not an excuse._

_I know, _Scarecrow said quickly, moving slightly away. _Believe me, I know, and I didn't mean it to be. You have a right to be angry—_

_Every right._

_Fine, every right. It was wrong, and I'm sorry._

He had better be sorry. Jonathan found himself taken aback at his anger. Even when Scarecrow had abandoned him, he'd felt grief over outrage. It occurred to him that he couldn't remember the last time he'd been so angry with his other half, or the last time they'd fought so forcefully. This place wasn't only accustoming him to the trappings of wealth and imprisonment. It was turning him against himself.

_Jonathan?_

_Why did you do that? _He tried to stay rational, keep the hurt from his voice, and absolutely failed. Recent circumstances had made little things like hiding emotions completely impossible. _What did you possibly hope to accomplish?_

_I don't know. _There was despondency in Scarecrow's tone as well. The circumstances were getting to the both of them, it seemed. _God, Jonathan. I have no idea. I was afraid that—_

_Afraid? _No. That was unacceptable. Scarecrow wasn't supposed to be afraid. He was supposed to be protecting. Jonathan was the fearful one, though he'd never admit it to anyone else. Scarecrow couldn't be afraid, because if he was afraid, everything had fallen apart. _Afraid of what?_

_Everything, all right? I was worried. For you. What do you think the Bat's going to do with this information?_

Jonathan felt a new spark of fear, one that up until now, he'd been able to suppress. Fear over Batman's knowledge had been overshadowed by worry over his situation with Scarecrow. But now that Scarecrow shared that fear, it came flooding back. _I—I don't know. He said I could stay—_

_That's worse. _He said it flatly, with no room for negotiation. _Why should he be so concerned about the mind of his captive? He should have taken you back a long time ago. But he didn't. What reason do you think he has for holding onto you? Because it can't be anything good._

_He says he's concerned for my well-being._

_Do you believe him? _He didn't say it scornfully, but the disbelief was evident. _How concerned can he be? He was concerned enough to let the Joker throw himself off a balcony, wasn't he?_

Once again, Jonathan found himself wondering the time, as it seemed far too early to deal with this. _He hates the Joker._

_Yeah, and he "hated" us. Before he got so interested. Here, he has complete control of us. What's to stop him from breaking us like he broke the Joker?_

Jonathan remembered the Joker's blank, unchanging face, and felt himself go cold. Scarecrow held tighter in response. _Do you think he would do that?_

_I don't know, Jonathan. All I know is that I can't trust him, not after everything he's done. At the end of the day, he's still the one who ruined everything for us, and no amount of hand-holding or breakfast-making is going to make up for that. Not ever._

His stomach was twisting into knots, for what felt like—and probably was—the hundredth time in the past week. Scarecrow had an uncanny talent for bringing up the points Jonathan had been trying the hardest to forget. He was only doing it to help, but that didn't make it any less unpleasant.

_What about you? Do you trust him?_

He froze in Scarecrow's arms, mind racing to find an answer, one that shouldn't take this long to select. Trust. He had no idea. It was one thing to ask him about hate, as he'd had time to assess the situation with that point of view, and decide that, while his feelings were conflicted, what he felt couldn't be described as hatred. And the friendship decision served as a back up to that assessment. But he hadn't stopped to consider trust.

Friends were supposed to trust each other. That much he knew. A friendship based in suspicion and accusation could hardly be called a friendship. So it stood to reason that if he considered Batman a friend, he would trust him.

Then again, this was hardly an ordinary set of circumstances, and hardly an ordinary friendship. His mental image of Batman was no longer the terrifying, hallucinated version of the man bearing down on him, but nor was that picture gone from his mind. It wasn't something he could let go of.

_Jonathan?_

_I don't know._

_You don't know?_

_No. Part of me feels like I'll never be able to forget what he did, but—_

He cut off, abruptly, when a gentle knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.


	51. Trust

AN: An explanation as to where I've been for the past two days, in script form: Thursday:

Lauralot: I'm going to go lock myself in my room until I can speak Latin again!

Friend: You know there's such a thing as over-studying, and that it's just as bad as not studying, right?

Lauralot: I can't hear you over the sound of Wheelock's Sixth Edition Latin text.

Friday:

Lauralot: Well, four hour car rides home totally suck. But at least we'll get back with time to do stuff. When are we leaving? Two-thirty? Three?

Friend: Five.

Thanks for all the reviews!

* * *

Batman stood in the doorway, fully dressed and looking alert. For anyone else, Jonathan would have taken the appearance as a sign that it was mid-morning at the earliest, long enough for someone to overcome the haze of sleep and, by the looks of his hair, shower. But Batman was not anyone, and given how little sleep he seemed to get by on, it could easily have been just past sunrise. Or sometime in the afternoon, on the off chance he'd crashed in the early morning hours and just now recovered.

It occurred to Jonathan that he'd been standing there for a good minute now, taking in the Batman without saying a word. "Um…hello."

He paused, waiting for his other half to shout. There was only silence.

Jonathan felt the briefest moment of panic, racing mind already suggesting that Scarecrow had left again, creating a surge of adrenaline in the seconds before he calmed down enough to realize that their connection was still open as ever. It brought comfort, but the absence of a smart remark directed either towards himself or the Bat was too striking to completely dilute the fear. _Scarecrow?_

_What?_ There was definite irritation in his tone, but not outrage. Jonathan hoped that was a good sign, but he couldn't be sure. At least when Scarecrow was screaming, it was a sign that he was staying around.

_Nothing. I just thought you might want to…say something. _

_I'm_ sorry _about that, all right?_ Very definite irritation. He hoped Scarecrow was too distracted by anger to note Jonathan's thought about how bad his other half was at apologizing._ I'm not going to yell about it. I still think talking to the Batman is asking to get hurt, but if you want to take that risk, go ahead._

It was amazing how worrisome he could make Batman's presence with one statement. The man in the doorway seemed much more ominous with his previous actions drawn to the front of Jonathan's mind instead of lurking in his subconscious. _Do you really think he'd do anything painful or— _

_I think I'll be ice skating on the surface of the sun before I'll trust him._

Jonathan paused, whatever part of his mind that was still focused on the outside world wondering what Batman must be making of this silence. _Don't you mean, in hell? _

_The sun's going to cool eventually. It's the same principle_.

He had a point, there. Jonathan let the mental conversation come to a close and realized that the Bat had just continued the physical one. "What?"

"I said, are you all right?" The look on Batman's face was one of concern, and it appeared genuine, as far as Jonathan could tell. Of course, he'd always been bad at reading any emotion that wasn't readily obvious, at least when said emotions were directed at him, and for all he knew, the Bat could be a hell of an actor. He doubted it was an act, but he couldn't be sure.

A few hours ago, he wouldn't have given it a second thought, but the sleep, combined with Scarecrow's suspicion, had brought his naturally untrusting nature back with a vengeance. "Y—yes. I'm fine. Did you want something?"

His expression fell. It was a slight movement, but not slight enough to escape Jonathan's notice. He supposed he'd sounded cold. It hadn't been his intent.

_That's what he gets for coming in here unannounced_.

Jonathan glanced down, though he didn't need the visual to know that Batman was still standing in the hall.

_Not the point, Jonathan. Whether or not he's in the room is irrelevant. He thinks he can waltz over whenever he wants and you'll drop what you've been doing to answer whatever question he feels he's entitled to ask. It shows a complete lack of respect for you, and your privacy. It's revolting. _

Jonathan wondered if it would be worth pointing out that the only thing he'd asked so far was a question regarding to his captive's health, after said captive had zoned out, and decided against it. Upon reflection, the Bat had demanded answers from him when he'd been lying on the ground, moaning in pain from Scarecrow's shrieks. Out of concern, perhaps, but there was a time and a place, and Batman had disregarded that.

The more he thought about that, the more he disliked it. And yet the concern afterward had seemed sincere, and the Bat hadn't thrown him back into Arkham.

He'd never been so at a loss for a side to take before now. He hated being stuck on the fence, but at the same time, it seemed the only logical place to be.

"Just to talk," Batman said, finally. "But I can come back, if you want."

_Tell him to come back later. Preferably several centuries from now. _

_You're not helping. _

_I'm not shouting, either. Consider this my way of lowering stress. _

_And adding to mine._ Jonathan sighed, brushed his hair back. "I—maybe it would be best if you just—"

"What happened to your hands?"

"What?"

Batman took hold of his wrist, bringing his arm back down and his hand into view. There were bite marks on his skin, half circles of scabbing where something had broken through. "That."

By the look of it, the bites were human. _Scarecrow. _

_You see… _He felt his other half shift, nervous. _The thing about cold showers is that they've very, very uncomfortable._

And now thanks to his alter ego's inability to control his lust, the Bat was going to think he'd picked up self-mutilation again. Lovely. _I'm going to find a way to kill you, and I'm going to take my time when I do it._

* * *

"That's not what it looks like," were the words Jonathan offered in excuse, but the tone was one Bruce usually heard reserved for statements such as "I walked into the door."

_Hell._

His life had become a never ending row of dominoes, beginning with his parents' death, and ending, for the moment, with the realization that either Jonathan was willfully injuring himself while he was in his "right" mind, or that he was doing it under the guise of his "Scarecrow." Either of which would be horrible, and add to the ever-growing mountain of problems life was throwing his way. He'd thought the psychosis was bad, and then he'd got the neediness. The neediness had been trying, and then the mood swings had started up. He thought things couldn't possibly get worse from there, and then the "Scarecrow" had come to light. And now this, which almost felt anticlimactic after everything else.

Perhaps he should begin viewing life with the most negative attitude possible, and then things would pick up. Certainly, it was hard to imagine them getting any worse. The only issue with that idea being that the stress would likely kill him within seconds.

"Okay," he said, trying to keep his voice calm, and not judgmental. The man was paranoid enough before his secret had come into the light, so letting his disbelief slip into his tone now would be decidedly counterproductive. "What is this, then?"

"Those were there this morning," he said, speaking quickly. "Those have been there since…sometime yesterday evening, after you gave me the aspirin. You just hadn't noticed." His words had slowed distinctly by the end of that statement, as though he was piecing it together very carefully, piece by piece.

Bruce was certain that he was.

"How did they get there?"

"I—after you left, I was disgusted with myself. For asking to be your friend. I wanted to…punish myself for it."

For a cover story, he wasn't doing the covering well at all. "So you bit yourself?"

"No!" Jonathan shook his head, gathering his bearings. "No. I got in the shower and turned on the cold water. And I was biting my hands to keep from screaming and attracting you back with the noise."

Well, that would explain the near hypothermia from the previous day. Assuming that it was a true story, which Bruce doubted. Not that there weren't some bits of truth to it—he'd obviously been in the shower before Bruce found him freezing yesterday, and he couldn't recall if the bite marks had been there back then—but Jonathan Crane could not lie to save his life. He'd been much better at it when he was still Arkham's administrator, but now he lacked the ability almost altogether. What had caused the change, Bruce wasn't sure, but at times like these, he was thankful for it.

He stared at Jonathan, and noted the way the man's eyes had glanced to the side, again, as they had so many times during his explanation. The realization struck him in the face and he could have slapped himself for not figuring it out sooner. The voice in his head. It was the same dis-focused look he got when speaking to the hallucination, the one that had probably invented the excuse he'd just heard.

The hallucination that, come to think of it, might have no issue with causing physical damage considering how well it doled out mental anguish. "You're sure?"

"Yes."

He knew he was going to regret asking, but did so anyway. "It didn't have anything to do with Scarecr—"

"No!" Jonathan pulled his hand out of Bruce's grasp, features clouding. "I told you what happened. If you don't want to believe me, fine, but don't call me a liar."

"I wasn't trying to insinuate that you were." He wanted to close the space between them and _make_ him listening, put an end to the hide-and-seek format that all their conversations seemed to take. "I just want us to be able to trust each other, all right?"

Trust was the furthest thing from Jonathan's expression. Bruce wondered how much of his paranoia was natural, and how much the voice in his head added. Not that he'd trust his worst enemy and captor at once either, but it was still frustrating.

"I can't."

"You can. We both can."

His own words gave him pause, and he let the other reassurances he was planning die on his lips as he considered them. _We both can._ Which implied that he would trust Jonathan as well.

_Can I do that?_ Agreeing to be his friend had been enough of a mind screw, especially when he learned the full extent of the man's condition. At least, he hoped that was the full extent. He certainly wouldn't be able to handle it if it turned out that there were other severe symptoms he was in the dark about. But possible conditions aside, his current state bordered on far too much for Bruce to handle.

How could he trust a man who barely knew what was going on in his own mind? A man who was remorseless, dangerous, and quite possibly beyond help?

_Beyond help_. He gave the tiniest of head shakes. He refused to believe that. He refused to believe it about any criminal, with the sole exception of the Joker, and even in that case he foolishly held the smallest modicum of hope. Organized crime in Gotham was one thing. The mob could be imprisoned, and held for the time it took the city to repair itself. But the "supervillains" were a different story entirely. As long as they were around, the city was in jeopardy, and it wasn't a simple matter of locking them up. Imprisonment didn't deter them, and it didn't end the madness.

More than anything, aside from being kept far away from the populace, the villains needed help. To admit that they were beyond it would be to admit that his efforts were futile.

Not only that, but against his better judgment, he did feel concern for Jonathan. A real concern, beyond pity at his condition. There was no denying what he could and had done, and all Bruce needed to do was think back on the mass of Gotham residents driven mad by the toxin to be disgusted with himself for admitting it, but he couldn't hate Jonathan, not after seeing him this open and vulnerable. He could hardly feel anger about it, anymore. Right now, what he felt the most strongly was worry about his friend's wellbeing.

His friend's wellbeing. Because, also against his better judgment, sometime between last night and the present, he'd begun considering Jonathan as a friend.

"You can trust me," he said, blinking slowly as he forced himself to focus on Jonathan. "What do you want me to do to prove it?"

For a moment Jonathan stared, confused, before looking away and pondering, silently, for what felt like an eternity. Bruce got the sense that it wasn't the best suggestion, but it was too late to take it back now. "I…"

"Yes?"

Jonathan glanced back to face him, then looked down at the carpet and said, nervously, quietly, "I want to go outside."


	52. Outside

AN: An explanation as to where I was yesterday, also in script form:

My Mother: And today we're going to a family reunion, so we can spend time with our relatives and enjoy each other's company.

Lauralot: Hey, the field next door has an actual scarecrow. I haven't seen one of those since I was six. [Seriously, this captivated my interest for at least half an hour.]

My Mother: And now that the reunion's over, I could take this time to do something productive, but I'd rather just procrastinate. Want to help?

Lauralot: I'm a college student. Procrastinating is what I do best!

As I've said, I seem to have less time at home than at college, for whatever reason.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

_That was a stupid thing to ask for._

_He said anything, didn't he?_

_I'm sure he meant anything within reason. _He risked glancing up. Batman was still staring at him, the silence growing more awkward with each passing second. He averted his eyes as quickly as he'd brought them up, noting before he did that the man's expression had been of contemplation, not rejection. Somehow, that only served to make things more nerve-wracking.

_Since when is going outside out of reason? Even at Arkham, they allowed that._

Jonathan considered pointing out that Arkham had gates, barbed wire fences, and armed guards, but decided there was no point and let it die. Scarecrow didn't care that the Bat had already had one escape, and would surely do everything in his power to prevent another, or that he might not make an offer of "anything you want" again, and that would mean Jonathan had wasted his opportunity by following Scarecrow's suggestion.

He was beginning to wonder if Scarecrow wasn't more concerned about proving that Batman was a bastard than he was about Jonathan's comfort.

_I am not. _His tone had become harsher, but not louder. Indignant, as opposed to angry. Ordinarily, it still would have been a cause for annoyance, however mild. Now, Jonathan found himself content with the fact that he wasn't being screamed at. _How can you even suggest that?_

_Because you just pressured me into requesting something that I have absolutely no chance of receiving, when I could have asked for something to my advantage?_

_And what would that have been?_

He stayed silent for want of an answer. Pointing out that he could have used the time Scarecrow had spent coercing him into his request to come up with something would only fall on deaf ears.

_I'm thinking in your best interests. You're the psychiatrist here. Do you honestly think that being isolated inside is healthy?_

"All right."

Both Jonathan and Scarecrow started, the former jolting his head up to stare at Batman. "Excuse me?"

"All right." His expression and tone indicated that he found this far from "all right," but he stepped to the side of the doorway, as if inviting Jonathan out into the hall. "But we're just going into the yard. And if you try anything, you're not going out again."

_So…it'll be exactly the same as before, then? Some threat._

Jonathan ignored the comment, not out of any frustration or disagreement with his other self, but because he was too stunned by Batman's words to register Scarecrow's. He'd agreed. He had actually agreed. Allowing Jonathan out of the manor achieved nothing beyond adding to the risk against the Bat's secrecy. Happiness on Jonathan's part, perhaps, and compliance, but neither of those was definite or tangible. He was risking everything to give fresh air to a captive. He was obviously mad.

If it weren't for the ever-increasingly complicated past between them, the man would make a fascinating case study.

"Jonathan." Batman's expression was a cross between concern, anxiety, and impatience, and Jonathan got the distinct feeling that he should get going if he wanted this offer to stay open. The only problem being that his body seemed to have stopped responding to his mind's signals.

"You're serious?" he managed, realizing that his throat had gone suddenly dry.

The Bat sighed and took his arm, leading him down the hall before Jonathan could protest. Not that he was in a state to offer objections, as his mind was still too busy trying to work the idea of "outside," into his worldview, which seemed to have eliminated everything but Wayne Manor and the Batcave at some point during his captivity.

Beside him, Batman had a cell phone in his free hand, talking to someone—someone named Lucius, if Jonathan had heard correctly—about how the GPS was going to register Crane as outside of the manor, but not to worry about it. He wondered, vaguely, how many people were in on Bruce Wayne's secret before he became sidetracked, again, by the thought of being out of the mansion.

He didn't even like being outside that much, under ordinary circumstances. Gotham was better than Georgia, but his default location had always been either research or reading, both of which he'd preferred to do indoors. Captivity had affected him far more than he realized.

He realized with another sudden jolt—this one unpleasant—that the Bat had not been leading him outside while he was distracted, but upstairs. His anxiety at this realization was not at all helped by Scarecrow's immediate _I told you we couldn't trust him._

"It's all right." Batman was still leading him, but Jonathan noticed that the pace has slowed. He must have stiffened upon figuring out where they were headed, or given some other sign of apprehension that the man had picked up on. "We're going. I just need to get something."

_If he intended that to be comforting, _Jonathan thought, stomach churning with anxiety, _then he failed on every possible level and ought to consider taking a course in diplomacy._

_What do you suppose he means by "something," anyway? _Scarecrow asked, as they were led through the doorway of the master bedroom. _Because I would say the thought of him having, say, a human version of those shock collars that keep dogs from running away is completely ridiculous, but considering his night job, anything goes._

_You're not helping. _The Bat released his arm, crossing the room and stepping into his closet, the one that was larger than Jonathan's entire apartment.

_The man has throwing knives in the shape of bats. I'm being honest. Whatever bat gadget he's retrieving is not something I'd want to be around._

Jonathan wondered if running off or finding a good hiding place wouldn't be in his best interest—not that it mattered, thanks to the GPS—when he returned, bat gadgets in hand.

Said bat gadgets being, in actuality, a bucket hat and a pair of sunglasses. "Here."

Wordless, Jonathan took them, glancing out the windows. It was overcast, so they must be meant to conceal rather than protect. "Do the paparazzi make a habit of hiding in your yard?"

"No." The Bat was leaning down beside the bed, now, pulling a case out from underneath it. "But I'd rather not take any more risks. Come here."

He did so, examining the sunglasses as he went. They were large and dark, the sort celebrities wore when they tried to hide their faces. Considering that Batman wore these, he wondered how big they would be on him, before the Bat took them, setting them and the hat down on the bed. He took Jonathan's hand, spreading something cool and smooth over the back of it.

"What is that?" His fingers twitched, but the Bat's grip was too secure for him to pull out of.

"Disinfectant." He gestured to the case on the bed spread, now lying opening. It was full of first aid supplies. Jonathan wondered idly if Batman kept one in every room of the house, considering his line of work, watching as his captor bandaged the bite wounds. His immediate response was _Well, _that_ won't attract suspicion if I am seen _though he couldn't help but be grateful, considering all the bacteria in the average human mouth.

_Do you remember when the Joker dislocated your shoulder?_

He blinked. _What?_

_The time you tried to run away from him. When he ended up dislocating your shoulder._

_What about it?_

_He reset it for you._

He considered pointing out that it was Scarecrow who'd bitten him, not Batman, but decided that it would be best to stay silent, for the sake of peace. The Bat finished wrapping his hands and stood, beckoning for him to follow. He slid on the hat and sunglasses—overlarge, but not as badly as he'd expected—and did so, immediately deciding that putting on sunglasses while indoors hadn't been the best of ideas. But taking them off, what with the limited mobility caused by the bandages, would be more effort than it was worth, so he took the chance of injuring himself and carried on half-blinded.

By some long overdue and woefully inadequate stroke of luck, he managed to avoid accidental self-harm. The door Batman led him to wasn't the one he'd tried opening before, and he doubted it opened to the same side of the house. That suspicion was confirmed when the Bat opened the door and stepped through, beckoning for him to follow.

* * *

"Come on."

Jonathan lingered in the doorway, and from what little he could see of the man's face, he was apprehensive. His hair was long enough now to be visible under the overlarge hat, and that, combined with the sunglasses and the fact that his clothes were formfitting, for once, made him even more feminine than usual.

He remained stationary, looking as if he expected to have the door slammed on his hand, or be otherwise mistreated, if he tried moving. Bruce had never realized just how expressive his mouth was until his eyes had been concealed.

He stepped backwards, leaving the area of the deck around the door empty. "Come on. It's all right."

Jonathan hesitated for a moment longer, before stepping out, slowly and cautiously as a deer walking into a meadow. After the first few steps, he seemed to acknowledge that this wasn't a trick and gained speed, stepping off of the deck and into the yard at a normal pace, with Bruce behind him. He stopped, abruptly, so suddenly and totally that Bruce grabbed his hand, worried he was preparing to run.

He didn't move, not even in response to the contact. "Jonathan?"

"How long will we be out here?" he asked it so softly that Bruce had to lean in to catch the words.

Time wasn't something he'd considered, being too caught up in concealment and security. "As long as you want, within reason."

Jonathan smiled, genuinely smiled, and Bruce realized that "within reason" was going to end up meaning "until I have to drag him back inside because I can't go any longer without food." And then, just as abruptly as he'd stopped moving, he sat down, almost dragging Bruce with him.

"Jonathan?"

"I like your lawn," he said, as if that was an explanation. He leaned in a way that suggested he would be lying down by now, had Bruce not been holding his hand. "And I haven't been in grass for a very long time. So shut up."

He ran his free hand through the grass, taking a moment to savor the sensation before he stood, moving quickly in a way reminiscent of both an excited child and an intrigued cat. For a moment, Bruce thought his movements were purposeless, until he realized that Jonathan wasn't just running from point to point at random, but rather stopping in front of something each time—be it the flowers by the deck, or the trees toward the back of the yard, and so on—and stopping to examine each, however briefly. He moved as if he didn't comprehend that he wasn't going to be dragged back into the manor at any moment, and was trying to take in everything he could in the shortest time possible. Bruce was about to tell him he could relax when Jonathan stopped and sat again, this time out of exhaustion. The part of his face that was visible was flushed, and he was panting, though only slightly.

"Are you all right?"

"I love your yard." He didn't sound as though he'd heard the question at all.

"I'm glad." Satisfied that he was going to stay in place, and couldn't get far in such a state even if he did run, Bruce let go of his hand. Jonathan lay back immediately, arms spread to either side and loosely gripping the lawn, eyes presumably staring up at the clouded sky. "I never pictured you as a nature lover."

"I hate nature. But I also hate to be isolated from it."

He nodded, and sat beside him. "I'll try not to keep you as isolated."

Jonathan turned to face him for the first time since coming outside, his smile slowly fading. "You make no sense."

"And you've just now realized this?"

"I've expressed nothing but a desire to get away from you. At least, until the past twenty-four hours or so. And you respond to that by giving me more freedom."

"I want you to be able to trust me, remember?"

Jonathan didn't answer, biting his lower lip. His face tensed for a moment, changing in some subtle way that Bruce couldn't quite describe. From what he could see, it looked similar to his expression from before when he'd been talking to himself. He ventured a guess. "Is Scarecrow unhappy with this?"

"Why don't you ask me directly, Bat?"


	53. Conversation

AN: So my roommate, who is studying Japanese, decided to write my name in kanji today. The Japanese version of my name is "Rouren," as there's not really an "l" sound in Japanese, and the kanji she chose to make up my name were "bright" for rou, and "scythe" for ren. Scythe. I swear, even when I'm not trying, there is so much in my life that can be linked to scarecrows and/or harvest. Such as my being a Virgo, the Zodiac constellation which marks the start of the harvest season. It would be eerie if it wasn't so awesome.

And by way of explanation for yesterday, I was stuck in an incredibly long and boring residence hall council meeting for quite some time.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"Scarecrow." The pause before he said it was a fraction of a second too long, delayed by the time it took his mind to process the implications of his captive's statement. It would have been almost imperceptible to a detached observer, but he was sure Jonathan had picked up on it, along with the unease he was trying to conceal.

He smirked, not bothering to sit up or even turn toward Bruce. "Obviously."

The way he held himself had changed as well, though he hadn't moved, lying, arms to his sides, on the ground. It was something about his posture, though it remained casual. Before, his look had been one of pure, human relief and understated joy. Now, he looked more like a hungry cat, content to be lying down at the moment, but nonetheless watching for unsuspecting prey.

Now that he noticed the difference, he was at a loss to explain why he hadn't seen it before. Like one of those "hidden image" pictures, it was impossible to un-see and glaringly obvious after the fact. Everything about the man had changed, subtle though the changes were.

And to think that he was called the world's greatest detective.

"Are you planning on saying something, Batman, or are you content to keep sitting there, mouth agape?"

Bruce registered, between his self-criticism and confusion, that his mouth was hardly agape, or even open. Though his confusion was probably playing out very well over the rest of his features. "Well, are you?"

"Unhappy to be outside? Hardly." Even his _voice _had changed, not in pitch or timbre, but cadence. Jonathan put an odd emphasis on words to begin with—his pronunciation of Batman springing readily to mind—but this "other half" made the stress much more noticeable. It wasn't something noticeable unless one was looking for it, but Bruce was, and now it was obvious as a slap across the face.

"Your presence, on the other hand," he continued, drawing Bruce's attention back, "does dampen the experience. But then, I could say that for any situation. I've adjusted."

He'd allowed himself to become lax when it came to Jonathan Crane, that was the problem. For all his thoughts about how little he understood the man's condition and how ill-equipped he was to be responsible for him, he'd stopped viewing him the way a detective would at some point during the captivity, and started assuming that the motivation between any and all of his bizarre behaviors was simply insanity.

Which it was, but in a very different way than he'd envisioned. If he'd noticed the alternate personality, or hallucination, or whatever was wrong sooner, so much struggling and suffering could have been averted. At the very least, he might not have gone through the kiss and all the confusing aftermath he was still struggling to work out.

"If you don't have something else to say, it's rude to just stare. Don't you have a business to…wait, you don't actually do anything there, do you?"

Whatever this was, hallucination, alter ego, or otherwise, he didn't like it. The "screaming at Jonathan in his own mind" thing had been a warning sign, but the actual conversation confirmed it. Jonathan, lately at least, was willing to be speak with him, even if he was hesitant. Scarecrow seemed interested only in insulting him—seem to _delight _in it, given his ever-increasing smirk.

"I'm taking the day off."

"As usual. You know, Jonathan never missed a day as Arkham's administrator? You can object to his practices, but you can't deny that he put all his heart into it. Unlike some."

Bruce didn't point out that the objective Jonathan had devoted himself to was hardly part of his job description. He'd allowed himself to slip too much already, far too much, considering that Jonathan Crane was a dangerous psychopath, despite how helpless recent events had made him seem. Especially considering that some part of his mind appeared to be made up of nothing but vitriol and sarcasm, and that part was apparently capable of overriding the rest of him.

Assuming that Scarecrow did override. For all he knew, this could be closer to an elaborate role play on Jonathan's part. Which was why he wasn't going to let himself be drawn into a petty argument with a mental patient, as opposed to using this opportunity to figure out what he was dealing with. He was a detective, home or abroad, and it was time to start living up to that.

"I take it you're the one that wanted to end the friendship?"

"I'd hardly call a prisoner's interaction with his jailer a friendship, Bat. It doesn't matter how civilly you treat a caged animal. At the end of the day, it's still in a cage. Unless you're one of those idiots who believes that locking something up is the humane thing to do."

"You'd have preferred me to throw you out on the street when you were mad?"

"Jonathan," he corrected, features twisting into a scowl. "And I'd have preferred you to leave me the hell alone. I still would."

There wasn't the slightest falter in his casual position, or a hint of apprehension in his voice. Jonathan, even after they'd come to calmer terms, would still flinch after criticizing him. He was still operating under the assumption that Scarecrow was not an alternate personality, because everything he knew about dissociative identities countered that, but nor did it seem like a name Jonathan hid behind. Everything about him was markedly different, and if it was an act, Jonathan had far more self-control than Bruce had ever seen him display. "Shouldn't you be angry at the Joker for this?"

Oddly enough, the mention of the Joker appeared to calm him, the scowl settling back into a malicious grin. A friendship, if it could be called that, had reformed between the clown and the ex-doctor, but given their past, the last thing Bruce would have expected was a smile at the Joker's name.

If this was a hallucination, it was a powerful one.

"He exists because of you, therefore _you _are the reason we're here. Besides, you were the one behind the poisoning."

_We're. _He viewed them as separate as well. "What are you?" Too blunt, he knew, but moving in circles was getting nowhere. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"That's none of your business, is it?"

"You're—"

"Living in your home, which makes it your concern, and blah, blah, blah. I didn't ask to be here, and you can't guilt me into telling you whatever you want to know."

"I'm not trying to guilt you. I'm trying to understand."

He laughed, an ugly, barking sound. Bruce had only heard Jonathan's laugh once, months ago, and he couldn't recall if it had sounded like that. "As if you're trying to gain insight for any purpose beyond your own convenience. All your little speeches about helping people? They don't fool me."

This was like talking to the Joker. If the Joker was more restrained, and less lewd in his remarks. The same circular conversations and biting retorts, digging into Bruce's own motives. He'd let it affect him when the Joker had done it, and that wasn't a mistake he'd make again. "I let you outside."

"How very humane of you. And how long had I been here before you gave me that privilege? Even Arkham let me out after two weeks. In a straitjacket, but outside."

He kept his features impassive, trying to not show the scrutiny with which he was regarding the man. "Funny. Jonathan panicked at the thought of going back there."

He scowled again, mouth managing to convey enough disdain to compensate for his concealed eyes. "That was a moment of duress."

"That you caused."

"_Shut up._" He looked feral in that moment. Not just different, but wild. "Hard as this is for you to grasp, you _don't _understand him. Either of us. And your attempts to act otherwise get old fast."

Scarecrow looked on the verge of shouting, so Bruce refrained from comment. Provoking him into rage wouldn't accomplish anything. He'd seen the screaming fits before, and he had neither the energy nor the desire to experience it again. Not unless it was absolutely necessary, and he was fully rested. And come to think of it, he couldn't remember the last time he'd been fully rested, so the odds of that were low.

After another minute's worth of glaring—Bruce assumed he was glaring based on the direction he'd turned his head and his visible expression—Scarecrow looked away, exhaling loudly. He lay back down fully, pointedly facing away from Bruce.

It was then that Bruce noticed how much Scarecrow was enjoying being out of the house.

His happiness didn't manifest the way Jonathan's had, that giddy, blissful behavior that was oddly endearing, despite the man's past. He hadn't even fully relaxed, posture still tense and ready to strike. But the smile on his face was genuine, if different than Jonathan's, and while his fingers were clenched through the grass, it didn't look as if his grip were out of anger. It looked as if he was attempting to reassure himself of his surroundings, or keep from being removed.

That should have been reassuring, but the effect was similar to the time he'd seen the Joker without his makeup. Revealing a being's humanity wasn't always comforting. Sometimes, it was almost worse, because it was a reminder that _anyone _could become so twisted, so removed from normalcy or human decency. Seeing a villain's humanity reminded him of how close he'd veered toward that path, and just how slippery the slope was.

And seeing humanity from something he couldn't even define, as with the Scarecrow, was more unsettling than anything else.

"Scarecrow."

"Hmmm?" Just one syllable, but the malice was gone, the man distracted by whatever had caught his eye. The wind blowing through the trees, possibly. He sounded like Jonathan in that moment—and as they shared vocal cords, that wasn't surprising—and only his posture kept Bruce from thinking they had switched control. His hands twitched, entire body looking somehow energetic, as if coiled and ready to spring.

"We need to go back inside." It pained him to say, as it was the happiest he'd seen Jonathan since the library, but he was self-aware enough to realize that the curiosity of the "other half" had his attention divided, and that was the last thing he needed when dealing with some sort of alter ego gone wrong, who looked prepared to make a break for it at any moment.

"No." The hard edge was back in his tone immediately, pulling himself as far away from Bruce as he could without actually rolling or standing up.

"I'll let you back out." He extended a hand in invitation, and Scarecrow did flinch, as if slapped.

"Why should I believe you?"

He held in a sigh, standing. He didn't cross the space between them, deciding not to make any movement that could be deemed aggressive unless it proved completely necessary. He didn't know what the results of startling him would be, and he didn't want to know. "Because if you don't get up now, I'll consider taking you out to be too much of a risk, and never do it again."

It was amazing, how much he could vary the tension in his body language. From waiting for an opportunity to anger, and now to fear, without visibly moving at all. "I think you're bluffing."

He opened his mouth and chose to let the words _Care to test it? _die on his lips. Scarecrow was far more confrontational than Jonathan, challenging him was akin to waving a red flag. "Get up."

There was a sigh, longer and louder than Bruce would have thought humanly possible, but he did stand as he did it, even if it was as slowly as he could. He strode back to the door without so much as a glance in Bruce's direction, or even a smart remark, as his captor trailed behind, wondering, as he did so often these days, how he was going to get around the latest wrench in the works.


	54. Mechanics and Miracles

AN: As always, sorry about the delay. (I know that two days without an update is by no stretch of the word a delay, and yet I still feel the need to apologize. It's weird.) Anyway, Thursday night's lack of anything was based partly in writer's block, and partly because I spent half the evening in another dorm meeting where we had to vote on things like whether or not we wanted sign-up lists for our laundry. All of which we'd already voted on using paper ballots, so I'm really not sure as to why we had to do it again. At least I had a sweater to knit during the meeting, and there were Little Mermaid cupcakes afterward.

Yesterday, I was away from my dorm for pretty much then entire day after classes were over. Remember the author I'm always recommending and now recommending again, 4ofCups? Well, yesterday I actually got to meet her in real life. To say that it was the Greatest Experience Ever doesn't fully cover it.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Scarecrow was the one to walk through the door, but Jonathan was the one inside, after the initial steps.

Immediately after noticing that, Bruce realized he could tell the difference before the man had even turned around. Once he knew what he was looking for, the disparities in posture and movement were blindingly obvious, and just as he had outside, he felt self-disgust at not noticing sooner. He'd unwittingly written those changes off as a symptom of psychosis, or part of a mood swing. And while that was what they boiled down to, in essence, it was a complete over-simplification, akin to describe the infinite size of the universe as very big.

The entire situation was a textbook example of why making assumptions was a terrible idea.

During this revelation, Jonathan had turned back to face him, now regarding his expression with a mix of confusion and anxiety. "What?"

"Nothing. Just thinking."

He looked even more uncomfortable, at that. Bruce guessed that it was fear that conversing with Scarecrow had changed his mind about allowing Jonathan to stay, and that he was about to be carted back to the asylum. He decided not to say anything against the idea, not wanting to suggest the idea if that wasn't what had been going through the man's mind.

"Are you hungry?"

"No."

Bruce tried to think of when Jonathan had last consumed something besides coffee. He must have at some point yesterday, but Bruce had no idea as to when that point was. "You don't eat much, do you?"

"You don't sleep much."

"Touché."

There was irritation on Jonathan's features now, and he moved away from Bruce to the nearest piece of furniture—a couch—and sat. "Don't look at me that way."

"What way?"

"As if I'm a mystery to be solved." He leaned back, absentmindedly rubbing his temple in a way that appeared to indicate frustration for once, as opposed to pain. "There are two halves to me. It's not that hard to figure out. Move on."

He wondered if the renewed directness was a compensation for fear at the thought of being thrown out, or newfound courage in the knowledge that his other half's temperament hadn't been enough to break Bruce's patience. "It's not that easy."

Jonathan opened his eyes, not quite glaring. "Why not?"

"Most people don't have…" _Hallucinations that can take over their bodies? Split personalities that defy psychiatric criteria?_ There was no delicate way to say it, even if he could define it. "A second person in their bodies."

"He's not a second person. He's a part of me while being completely separate."

He said it as if it made perfect sense, rather than making things all the more convoluted. It was a reminder that, much as Bruce strove to understand the criminal mind, he'd hate for his own thought processes to resemble anything close to the villains. "And how does that work?"

Jonathan sighed. The manner in which he did so left it open to interpretation as to whether he was purposefully loud about to annoyance, or honestly didn't grasp his lack of tact. Knowing him, it could be either. "Ask a Christian."

It took several seconds to adjust to the absolute randomness of the statement enough to reply. "What?"

"The Holy Trinity. From Christianity. God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I'm sure you've heard of it."

If Jonathan had any sense of humor whatsoever, Bruce would have concluded that he was being set up for the punch line of a bizarre joke. That was how much sense this made. "I thought you weren't religious."

His look of faint irritation was immediately dropped for one of more obvious suspicion. "How do you know that?"

"It's in your file."

He flushed slightly, but continued. "I'm not. Religion only serves to assuage the fears of uncertainty and mortality. But that's not the point. The point is, the Holy Trinity is made up of three distinct selves that are still one entity, and no one ever questions the workings of that."

"So…" This sort of thing made much more sense when applied to deities far more complex and powerful than humanity could ever hope to be. "It's the mental equivalent of being one person with two bodies?"

Bruce was expecting a biting response, surprised to instead hear, "Almost. Only each "body" has a distinct personality while still being part of the same human. It's not that odd."

_It certainly is. _He didn't say it aloud, but his expression must have given it away, as Jonathan glared again and added, "It's a deeper version of your own brand of duality. Imagine if Bruce Wayne was separate from you."

So he was still "Batman" as far as Jonathan was concerned. Wonderful. With that in mind, it was a wonder they were speaking at all. "And he's always been there?"

"Yes." It was impressive, how terse and exasperated he could make a monosyllabic word. "We couldn't trade control until after you poisoned me, but he's always existed."

_Shit. _There were certain realizations that destroyed a person's happiness, and the knowledge that, in addition to giving Jonathan brain damage, he'd inadvertently worsened the man's already severe mental condition was definitely one of them. "Oh."

Jonathan raised his head for the first time since asking about the files, meeting Bruce's eye. For all his ineptitude at understanding the people around him, he had an uncanny ability to figure out a person's weak point and dig at it, repeatedly. He'd done that last February, with his constant remarks about Batman being nothing more than a cover for thrill-seeking, and by the look in his eyes, he was thinking of doing it again.

So, as a distraction, Bruce asked the first question to pop into his mind. Which, unfortunately, was "Which one of you kissed me?"

* * *

_What?_

He'd been hoping that he'd heard wrong, and Scarecrow would correct him. Rather, his other half was as bemused as he was, and could only offer _Did he seriously ask that?_

Gaping was not something Jonathan made a habit of doing—unless he was around the Joker, as that was the only sane way to respond to the clown the majority of the time—but he was unable _not_ to now. That was what Batman was concerned with? Not the fact that what was essentially another captive had been hidden from him the entire time, and not that he'd been absolutely clueless as to that fact, but which half had put their lips together? It was almost surreal, how unnecessary of a question it was.

How the hell was he supposed to answer that, anyway? Not responding would make it clear that it was him, but he doubted an explanation along the lines of "Apparently, you turned Scarecrow on rather badly and when I woke up, I was drugged and unable to figure out what was going on beyond that I was pinned and aroused, and since kissing the Joker usually got him to let go I assumed the same would work in this situation" would achieve anything. Aside from getting him sent back to the madhouse.

He was trying to decide whether it would be better to start stammering out an explanation and hope that a convincing lie came out or just to glare until the Bat dropped the matter, when Batman made things much simpler for him.

"Sorry. You don't have to answer that."

So he was capable of figuring out when he was being absolutely tactless. That was new. And hopefully permanent.

Though with that said, now that the situation was brought back to mind, he couldn't make himself forget it.

_Scarecrow?_

_Yes?_ Judging from his tone, Scarecrow had realized exactly what he was about to be asked, and was just as uncomfortable thinking about it as Jonathan was about asking.

_Yesterday…when I woke up on the bed…what happened? _He knew from the bite marks that there had been a cold shower involved at some point in the day, but beyond that, it was blank, and until now, he hadn't given it much thought. Now that he was considering it, he realized that in order for there to be a cold shower preceding the kiss, Scarecrow must have been aroused by the Bat at least twice. Wonderful. This was why they said ignorance was bliss.

_What happened is that the Batman had me pinned to a bed. His body was pressed up against mine. Friction. It happens._

That, Jonathan was willing to believe. The body had natural reactions, and it seemed those reactions always occurred at the worst possible time. Not to mention, as he'd realized while conducting his experiments in Arkham Asylum and during his time with the Joker, that Scarecrow had a "thing" for fear, as long as it was either someone else's, or, when it was his own, non-life-threatening. Generally, Jonathan had never viewed it as a problem, because Scarecrow had always dealt with that sort of thing after an experiment or with the incredibly willing Joker—though the latter was utterly mortifying—but those circumstances had never involved Batman.

_And the time before that?_

Silence. Absolute silence. The link between them was open as ever, but Scarecrow was apparently unwilling to answer.

_Scarecrow? _He gave the mental equivalent of a nudge, hoping he wouldn't be shouted at in response.

For a moment he thought Scarecrow wasn't going to respond at all. Then: _He has nice hands, all right?_

Fantastic. He was a prisoner—better than being locked up in Arkham, but still—he'd yet to discover a way out of the manor or a method to remove the GPS, and now the realization that his other half was reaching arousal and torturing them with freezing showers because Batman had nice hands. Things could not possibly get any worse or more humiliating, unless the Bat had been aware of Scarecrow's predicament. And if that happened, he may have to kill himself out of the shame.

_It wasn't that bad._

_That's debatable. _Scarecrow, at least, had a sex drive. Jonathan, on the other hand, had been put off of the entire business long ago—being accused of masturbating and then terribly punished for it before he even fully understood what masturbating was tended to do that for—and had almost no physical response without direct stimulation. So for him, the very fact that his body had responded was very much "that bad." Add in the fact that the Bat might have realized what was going on, and it become outright hellish.

On the rare occasions when Jonathan conceded that there might be some sort of divine entity in the universe, he usually concluded that it was malevolent. At least, as far as his life was concerned.

_He didn't notice._

_How can you be sure of that?_

_Because. _He felt Scarecrow roll his eyes. _Think about it, Jonathan. I'm sure you've figured out by now that the Batman is incapable of leaving well enough alone. If he'd noticed, he'd have demanded an answer about it._

_Somehow, I think even he'd have the sense to leave this one alone._

_Well, he'd start blushing or avoiding eye contact or something if he knew. Trust me._

_He was lying on top of you! How would he not know?!_

_Let's not question the miracle, all right?_

There was a hand waving in front of his face, suddenly, and he snapped out of the internal dialogue, blinking. "What?"

"Are you all right?" Batman looked concerned, and it was at times like these when Jonathan wished that he had the slightest ability to judge whether or not emotions were faked. With his patients, he'd been good at it, but his patients had never expressed concern for him.

"Fine."

"You were staring off into space," he explained, looking somewhat sheepish. Probably just remembered Scarecrow's existence and realized that Jonathan was in a separate conversation. For an intelligent person, he could be an idiot.

"I was thinking."

"Right." The Bat straightened up, with a glance toward the door. "Well, I'm getting lunch, if you want anything."

_Don't._

But loath as either of them was to admit it, they were hungry, so Jonathan stood and followed. During the walk to the manor's kitchen, he got a good look and decided that, while it didn't arouse him in the least, Batman did have nice hands.


	55. Actuality

AN: Fifty-five chapters, and nowhere near being finished. You know, I have no idea what it is about my dialogue/character-based "inaction stories" that keeps people reading, but I just want to say how much I appreciate it.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"You know, I can never figure out if watching you eat is grotesquely fascinating or just grotesque."

Ordinarily, a comment like that would have warranted at least a pillow thrown at Adrian's head. However, there was linguine to be eaten and a "classics" television station that actually showed the classics to be watched—there were only so many times he could read through the same books, especially given the speed at which he read—and these things had to be taken into account. It wasn't as if the quiet half-insults of an unlicensed doctor were at risk of truly angering him, anyway.

Provided, of course, that he didn't try talking over America's favorite redhead.

From somewhere down the hall, he could hear a sewing machine. He glanced toward the door, reflecting that Abigail hadn't really spoken to him since she discovered him with the MP3 player. Ridiculous, the way some people kept grudges. True, he had a notebook lying around somewhere of people who'd offended him—updated each time they left the state or took another name—in case he got in the mood for revenge or needed someone to threaten into doing his dirty work, on the off chance all his men were killed off, but it was one thing when he did it. He was, after all, a knife-wielding, murderous clown.

Seamstresses, however, had no business holding his kind of grudge. Even the ones that helped their siblings illegally sew up mafia members or other unsavory types on a near-nightly basis.

"I think she's making you something," Adrian said, following the Joker's line of sight.

He scowled, wondering if Abigail's vertebrae would make a nice necklace, before turning back to the screen to see whatever zany scheme Lucy and Ethel had gotten into this time.

"Nothing bad," Adrian added quickly, though his voice was lacking the tremor of a person truly in fear for his sister's life. The Joker's teeth missed the food they were supposed to be grinding, and closed down on his tongue, just enough to draw blood. Self-mutilation wasn't his style—much as he liked pain, he preferred it to come from others—but otherwise, he'd end up making some threat that, being unable to move, he couldn't carry out, which would make him seem that much less intimidating. True, he could just wait until he could walk again to carry it out, but he didn't like to be underestimated for any length of time when it didn't work to his advantage. It brought back memories of how Batsy had ignored him in favor of the mob at first, and almost nothing made him see red faster than that.

It was interesting how well the flavor of blood mixed with pesto. And dental plaque.

"I think she was planning on—"

"Adrian."

"Yes?" He glanced to the Joker's hands, as if expecting something to be thrown. The only sibling with a sense of self-preservation, which, ironically, made him the most entertaining and meaningful target.

"You're speaking over Lucille Ball."

Adrian looked to the screen without so much as an apology for interrupting. There were two kinds of people in the world; the people who appreciated _I Love Lucy, _and the people who didn't. The second group deserved to have their jaws torn off and their intestines pulled out through the gaping hole that had once been a mouth. "I wouldn't have pictured this as your brand of comedy."

"You have to respect the classics," he said, gesturing with the fork in a way that was meant to add emphasis but ended up dropping pasta on the painfully boring blue sheets that Abigail had put on the bed after he'd used the _Little Mermaid _ones as a Kleenex. It was a good thing that lying in filth didn't bother him, or he'd have died of discomfort weeks ago. "They paved the way for everything else. Now shut up. You do not interrupt the chocolate factory episode. It's like, uh, one of the Ten Commandments or something."

Adrian, who obviously had no respect for the classics and fit into the second group of people in the world, shut his mouth and watched for approximately seven seconds before turning back to his houseguest. "This has been done."

The Joker felt his eyes twitch. By the feel of it, his blood pressure seemed to be doubling every time he had the misfortune of hearing that uncultured boar speak. "It hadn't been done when she'd done it. She invented almost all the clichés you see in comedies these days. Keep talking and you'll lose your vocal cords."

"You've used that threat before. With Anika, remember?" It would seem that Adrian didn't have the sense of self-preservation the Joker had pegged him with after all.

"Who's to say I won't do it to the both of you?"

Something in his tone must have hit home, finally, because Adrian turned back the TV without another remark. For a minute or so, there was blessed silence, interrupted only by the Joker's giggling. Of course, after that minute was up, Adrian had to open his mouth again. Whatever had hit home appeared only to have hit the front door, rather than bursting through the outer wall and burying itself deep into a sofa or carpet. "The conveyor belt changed speed."

"What?"

"It changed speed," he said, gesturing to the television and utterly ruining the hilarity of the moment. "Before that woman told them to increase it. It was contrived."

The Joker leaned forward as far as he could, only to find that his hands were still a few inches short of grabbing Adrian's hair. Damn it. He'd been planning to pull the doctor up to the headboard and slamming his skull against the wall until his brains dripped out like overripe fruit. "It's _funny_, dumbass. The point is to entertain."

"I think you and I have different views of entertainment."

"Yeah, and yours _sucks._ This is comedy legend. This is what every American in the fifties watched, and what every family aspired to be."

"What, a housewife who always managed to screw things up and a husband who was constantly fixing her mistakes?"

There was genuine curiosity in Adrian's voice, and not sarcasm, and that was the reason the Joker modified his plan to only break half of his fingers once he got his hands on him. "It was a different time, idiot. Do you hate _The Merchant of Venice _for anti-Semitism?"

"It's not real, you know."

The Joker opened his mouth to say something witty and closed it again, confused. "What?"

"The show. You act as if I'm insulting you personally by disliking it. In real life, Desi Arnaz was a womanizer and Lucille Ball planned family gatherings when she knew the press would be there so people would think they had the perfect life. She was also terrible at public speaking and nearly committed career suicide every time she opened her mouth."

The Joker was not skilled at identifying his own emotions. At least, when it came to slapping them in boxes such as "happy" or "sad." He was able to describe them, however, and he could best describe this one as "the way a kid would feel if someone pulled off a mall Santa's beard in front of him." Not that he hadn't known all that, but it was akin to watching an old movie and remembering that the actors were deceased. Not something he wanted to consider. "That doesn't matter."

"What?"

"It doesn't _matter._ Nobody wanted Lucille and Desi when they turned their TV on. They wanted Lucy and Ricky. People don't care about the person behind the costume and, uh, makeup. They don't want to know. It's the theatricality that draws an audience, not the actuality. No one would watch if this had been a show about the real people."

"That's a depressing view of life."

"No, it's a true one." He made himself sit up further, relishing the pain in his legs—it was better now that it wasn't excruciating—and met Adrian's eyes. "People watch summer blockbusters 'cause they wanna see all the things _they'll _never get to do. Same thing with fantasy and science fiction, though those don't do as well because they're a little too far out of possibility. Your common layman's got at least some chance, however slight, of becoming the next, uh, Rambo, but he's not gonna find a unicorn flitting around his backyard, not ever.

"Anyway, day-to-day life is boring. Even the _reality_ shows script it. Television and books and all that, they're an escape. A way for people to live out the lives they'll never have. A, uh, _perfect _life, where her husband," he gestured to the television, "would never think of looking at another woman. It doesn't matter what he did in real life. Here, all is as it should be, and he's only got eyes for her."

* * *

Bruce found his eyes drift back to Jonathan, try as he did to focus on GCN.

He had ended up eating, albeit sparsely as ever, and was currently examining Bruce's DVD collection, occasionally sipping from the cup of tea he'd brought with him. He seemed absolutely enraptured—knowing him, he was analyzing Bruce's psyche through his cinematic tastes—and Bruce was relieved that the soft, expensive, and snow white floor rug did not extend to the corner where the man stood. If, in his distraction, he ended up spilling his beverage, Alfred wouldn't eviscerate him for staining the carpet. Knowing how seriously his butler took the running and protection of the manor, especially after it had been burned, that reaction wasn't too far out of the realm of possibility.

"Did you want something?"

"Are you aware that you have twenty-two James Bond films?" Bruce couldn't tell whether the tone in his voice was amazement or disgust. The latter made more sense, as the DVDs weren't exactly hard to find.

"Yes. They're good," he added, noting Jonathan's expression, feeling slightly defensive. Really, he shouldn't care what a madman thought of his taste in movies, and the fact that he did was a sign of how much this was getting to him, but he couldn't bring himself to be too worked up over it. Not when things were finally calm between them.

"Aren't they about a man shooting things and having sex with various women?"

"Not _just _that. Not the good ones. Have you never seen one?"

He shook his head, with a disdainful glance at the shelf.

"They're good."

"I'll take your word for it." He sat on the opposite end of the couch from Bruce, with a glance toward the useless news report playing onscreen. One would think in a city violent as Gotham, the networks would never run out of crimes to report, but it would seem that these days, the people had had all they could take of death and destruction, and so they ended up with stories about things like overblown health scares or scandals of the social elite. These were the times when twenty-four hour news stations, helpful as they could be, seemed absolutely worthless. "How can you watch this?"

"I was trained as a ninja. I've been taught to ignore pain."

Jonathan made a very brief sound that Bruce took as a laugh before covering his mouth and looking away. He took a moment to compose himself, and let another few minutes pass in silence before saying , almost too quietly to be heard, "I never got to see mine."

"What?"

"News broadcasts." He indicated toward the screen. "From when the toxin was released into the Narrows. I never got to see the reports from that time."

Amazing, how much that statement conveyed about Jonathan's mind. Bruce wasn't about to try holding the city ransom by poisoning the water supply, but he imagined that if he did, and became an outlaw with irreversible brain damage because of it, the last thing on his mind would be to see what the local news had to say about it. Such was the mind of a narcissist, apparently. "They…weren't complimentary."

"No. I suppose they wouldn't be." Absentmindedly, he ran his fingers over the faint remains of the burn scar Rachel had given him in the Narrows.

"Where did you learn to ride a horse, anyway?"

Jonathan turned toward him, brows creasing. "What?"

"Horses." It occurred to him that while his mind had been on the Narrows, Jonathan's would still have been on the news, so he clarified. "You rode one when the toxin was released, and there was the one the Joker gave you."

"That's not in my file?"

He decided smiling at that wouldn't win him any points and restrained himself from doing so. "I don't think they thought horseback riding was essential to your mental health."

"Oh." His face flushed, if only just.

"They did mention that you took a time to put a noose on the horse, though."

"He needed a noose," Jonathan protested, as if stopping in the middle of a riot to tie a noose and put it on a horse's neck was a perfectly valid use of time and resources. "Horses aren't frightening on their own, unless you're about to be trampled by one. Besides, the rope was tied into the reins, so it's not as if he was going to choke."

"Right."

Jonathan narrowed his eyes. He would have looked intimidating, if not for the past several weeks and the conversation they'd just had. He didn't respond, letting the conversation fade back into silence. Well, what would have been silence if not for the shameless anchors on the screen still providing stories more worthy of a supermarket tabloid than a news station.

Bruce, feeling that his mind was going to stop functioning if he watched much more, stood and walked to the DVD shelf.

"What are you doing?"

"You've never seen Bond, right? I'd rather watch espionage than this."

Jonathan muttered something about misogyny and melodrama, but he didn't protest when the DVD player was switched on. If anything, he seemed slightly closer to Bruce's side of the couch when Bruce sat back down.

* * *

AN: There really is a noose on the Scarecrow's horse in _Batman Begins. _It's hard to make out in the film—I'd seen it several times before I even noticed—but I think it's visible in a few of the production photos. You have to wonder what was going through his mind while he was hallucinating and everyone around him was going mad that made him think, "It needs a noose."

_I Love Lucy _was a wildly popular 50s sitcom, staring real life couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as Lucy and Ricky Riccardo. For those who haven't seen it, or the chocolate factory episode in particular, there's a clip of it here which I think sums it up pretty well (and hilariously): www. youtube. com/ watch?v=4wp3m1vg06Q

There is an episode of _Batman: The Animated Series _entitled "Joker's Favor," in which the Joker keeps tabs a man for two years, even after his victim has changed his name and moved.


	56. Conflicting Views

AN: I think Mondays will be the day I am most likely not to update, at least for this semester. Night class combined with Hall Council meetings suck all the creative spirit out of me, and then some.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

They were halfway through _Goldfinger _when Jonathan stopped talking.

Bruce doubted it was out of boredom; he'd certainly been active enough through _Dr. No _and _From Russia with Love_, even if every word out of his mouth had been a complaint, be it about the acting, plot, effects, or anything else he could think of. Despite his constant commentary, he'd been following the story lines, and seemed to be enjoying himself. Bruce got the feeling, watching him, that nitpicking every aspect of a film was simply what he did, regardless of whether or not he liked it. Generally Bruce was of the opinion that movies were to be watched in silence—even those as over the top as the Bond franchise—but he was willing to make an exception when the person watching was a hallucinating criminal with whom he already had a strained relationship.

Besides, the observations were sometimes humorous, or even insightful. The laser scene in _Goldfinger_, of all things, inspired a short analysis on the fear of castration and what it said about the masculine mind. Likewise, Pussy Galore's introduction led to a diatribe on sexism and the objectification of women in the media, albeit a very brief one. But almost immediately after he'd wrapped that up, he stopped speaking altogether.

For a moment, Bruce assumed he'd finally relaxed enough to enjoy the film in silence, melodrama aside. He was looking at the television when Bruce glanced at him, hardly even blinking. But the action developing on screen elicited no response, not even a change of expression. And the one expression he was exhibiting was oddly blank.

"Jonathan?"

He gave no indication that he'd heard.

_Hell. _He'd zoned out again. Which, as far as Bruce could discern, signified that the voice in his head was more interesting to him than the outside world right now. And experience had taught him that the blank moments never led anywhere good. An argument, if he was lucky, or a screaming fit, if he wasn't.

"Jonathan."

Nothing. And unpleasant as that was, it was to be expected. Bruce opted against trying to wake him—that would only anger him, even if it was successful—and sat back with a sigh, resolved to let him come to on his own.

Hopefully, he would.

* * *

_Have you lost your mind?_

Slowly and deliberately, Jonathan rolled his eyes, knowing Scarecrow sensed every second of it. _What now? _It was one thing to draw him into their mind, blinding them to the events of the outside world. There were times when he welcomed that, such as the group therapy sessions at Arkham or any time in childhood that he'd been stuck at a cafeteria table with his tormenting classmates. But to do it just to be insulting set him on edge.

Especially since Scarecrow had nagged him into the mental retreat. Jonathan might be the waking self, but it was hard to ignore someone inside his own mind, and even harder when that someone refused to stop demanding his attention until he gave it. And bizarrely, he'd actually been enjoying himself when he'd been called in. The Batman's taste in film left a lot to be desired, but any sort of intellectual stimulation in captivity was good intellectual stimulation.

Scarecrow better have a good reason for this.

_You're sitting on a couch with the Batman. Watching movies._

As if he hadn't known that already. _Brilliant observation. And your point is?_

He'd expected Scarecrow to be just as biting back, but his tone stayed deadly serious. _My point is that he's _the Batman._ The one who locked you up. You're acting like someone with Stockholm Syndrome._

_There has to be physical abuse or threat of death for Stockholm Syndrome, _Jonathan informed him, wondering how much he'd be shouted at if he went back to the outside world. _Look, there's no point in making myself suffer more while I'm stuck here. And as I recall, you took the time to enjoy lying on the grass outside. _And that had been infuriating, having that opportunity taken from him. Being aware of it wasn't the same as a firsthand experience.

Unsurprisingly, Scarecrow chose to ignore that bit of the argument. _Maybe you wouldn't be stuck here if you applied more effort to finding a way out than you do to critiquing Sean Connery's performances._

_I don't see you coming up with any brilliant plans._

_You're the mastermind. I'm the one who likes watching people scream._

_You know, they say that if you don't aspire to become more in life, you'll never get anywhere._

_Jonathan. _Just one word, just three syllables, but the way Scarecrow said it was enough to demand his full attention. _Do you remember when you asked me to come back?_

He swallowed hard, and felt his physical body do the same. _Which time?_

_The first time. When you were crying in the bedroom. Do you remember what you said?_

_That I needed you back._ He felt butterflies in his stomach, and a sudden sense of unease, though he wasn't sure why. He had the feeling that Scarecrow was thinking of something else from that event, something he couldn't recall.

_You said that you wouldn't question me again. Remember?_

Dread replaced anxiety, and he felt himself shake. _But—you promised that you wouldn't leave again—_

_I didn't say I was leaving. _His tone was still icy, though not cold as it had been. _What I'm saying is that I get the feeling you don't really want me back. You seem to be enjoying the Batman's company very much._

_That's not true. I need you. I—I fell apart when you left. You saw that. You can't think that—I don't—that's not true. _He hadn't even known it was possibly to stammer mentally. _Don't leave._

_I won't. _Scarecrow's hands were on his shoulders, and despite his lack of a physical presence, they were accompanied by reassuring warmth. _I promised, remember?_ _I didn't want to leave in the first place. I had no other choice. But it hurts, to see you do this._

_I'm not trying to hurt you. _

_I know. _He sounded tired, as if the weight of their situation was bearing down on him alone. And Scarecrow always had taken the worst of it. Jonathan had been the one to suffer the abuses and torments, but Scarecrow had been the one to pick up the pieces, comfort him when he was so traumatized he could hardly think. Jonathan couldn't imagine the strength that must have taken, or the selflessness. He was eternally grateful for that. _I know that you would never try to hurt me._

_I love you._

_And I love you. You are the most important thing in the world to me, Jonathan. You realize that, don't you?_

A nod. He felt Scarecrow embrace him, and returned the sensation. _No one will ever replace you._

_I'm not afraid of being replaced. I'm afraid for you. He's trying to make you complacent._

_What?_

_The Batman. You're like a bird in a cage, Jonathan._

There had been a time in his life, years and years ago, when the mere mention of the word "bird" or "crow" had made him shudder. Unsurprising, considering his grandmother's use of the foul things in her brand of discipline. Physically, he'd gotten over that tic long ago, but there had always been a pause in his mind when he heard or spoke it, even if it was only a split second. Psychosis temporarily lengthened and intensified the gap, and having regained his sanity not long ago, it was still enough to make him shudder.

Scarecrow noticed, and hugged tighter. _Like a bird in a cage that still sings. I don't want us to adjust to this. We deserve better than to spend God-knows-how-long—maybe forever—stuck inside like a shameful family secret. Look, I know that you'd confused as to his motivations, but I can't trust him. I _can't. _Not after all the suffering he's put you through._

_He let me outside. _A weak argument, he knew, hardly worth making, and yet he felt compelled to say something. He wasn't even sure why.

_And people who keep birds in cages might let them fly around the room. I don't think he's being nice, Jonathan. He's treating you like a pet, not a person._

He hadn't felt this conflicted since the Joker's ultimatum. Scarecrow had never lied, and he wouldn't. Not to him. But the Batman, as far as he had observed, had been genuinely kind, aside from his tactlessness and the imprisonment. And Scarecrow had been mistaken before, just not dishonest. But the Batman had ruined his life. For every argument he could conceive of, there was another to counter it, the two possibilities so entwined that he could scarcely tell where one began and another ended.

_It's okay. _Scarecrow unwound one arm from his other half and stroked Jonathan's hair back, head resting on his shoulder. _It's all right. I just want you to know that I'm worried._

_How can you be so sure?_

_Of what?_

_Anything. Everything. I don't know. _There were no words to explain it. Which shouldn't have mattered, as they could communicate through emotions, but his were still a confused maelstrom, and any message they conveyed would be clear as frosted glass. He settled on _How do you know that he can't be trusted? _though that only covered a fraction of his confliction.

_Because I don't believe for a second that he wants to help people. It's what you told him before: he's just using his parents' murder as an excuse to justify thrill-seeking. You saw how he broke the Joker, and admitted that he felt no remorse for it. He acts as if this isn't personal for him, but it obviously is. He's a liar, and a vigilante who pretends his cause is noble. When you hurt people, it's to help humanity in the long run. When he hurts people, it's for his own enjoyment. Sure, he acts concerned, but he's _acting, _just like he pretends to be an empty-headed playboy._

He was conflicted to the point of feeling ill, at this point.

_Jonathan. _Both arms were around him again, tight as the embrace could be without hurting. And since it was only a mental touch, that was very tight. _Please, don't worry yourself._

_But you think that he's going to hurt me. How is that anything but worrying?_

_I want you to be cautious, all right? That's all. I don't want you to make yourself sick._

_What does "cautious" mean? I'm living in his manor. I can't hide from him all the time, not matter how big this place is._ And he wasn't sure that he wanted to. Everything Scarecrow said had made good sense, but so little about this situation made sense to begin with, and he wasn't sure that it was the time to start applying logic to things now.

_I know that you can't. I'm not asking you to._

_What are you asking?_

_Just…watch out. And don't take everything he says at face value. He's holding you here, and it's in his advantage to have you behave a certain way._

As if he hadn't had enough on his plate. Now he had to second guess every action and remark on the Bat's part to see if he was being conditioned. Not that it wasn't good advice. _I will._

_Do you promise?_

_Yes._

Scarecrow tilted his head to the side, just enough to let him kiss Jonathan's cheek. _You are the most important thing to me._

_And you to me. _He let himself enjoy the embrace for another minute, before making himself wake up.

* * *

Jonathan came to as Bruce stood up, though he couldn't be sure if the latter had sparked the former. He blinked, shaking his head to slide his hair back, eyes focusing. For a few seconds he stared at the television screen, and the film paused on it, before wrinkling his nose and glancing at the blanket Bruce had placed on him, apparently startled by its sensation. "What is this?"

"You shivered. I thought you might be cold."

He seemed to accept that calmly, for all of two seconds, and then his expression became distrustful, glancing from Bruce to the blanket as if the thing was laced with smallpox. So the conversation he'd just held with himself had increased the paranoia. This "other half" just got better and better.

Jonathan glanced to the coffee table, and the bowl of popcorn sitting on it. "What is that?"

"Alfred made us dinner. He brought it in while you were…distracted. You should have some."

The popcorn, he regarded as if it was laced with cyanide. "Where are you going?"

"It's getting dark." The look on Jonathan's face told him that no further explanation was needed. "You can keep watching, if you want. Or not, either way is fine."

Jonathan looked as if he was going to say something, but caught himself, closing his mouth tightly. And so they'd taken a step back in communication. Again. He wondered if there was some way to drug the Scarecrow voice into silence without incapacitating Jonathan, before remembering that he was far from a pharmaceutical expert and certain to do more harm than good.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

Jonathan started, eyes wide. "What?"

"I'm not going to do anything. You looked nervous. You don't have to be." He hardly looked convinced, so Bruce added, "Really. I know you hate imprisonment, and I can't blame you. But I want you to be as happy as possible while you're stuck here. And if you want, I'll take you outside again tomorrow."

He felt it would be best to end the conversation there, so he left, not getting the chance to see if Jonathan looked any more trusting after that statement.

* * *

AN: The laser scene in _Goldfinger _is the famous one of James Bond strapped to a table as a laser beam slowly cuts through it, heading toward his crotch. You've probably seen it parodied if you haven't actually seen it.

During the French and Indian War, the American Indians were given smallpox-laced blankets by the British Forces at one point. I don't know any stories about cyanide-laced popcorn, though I'm a big fan of the webcomic _Cyanide and Happiness._


	57. Fool Me Twice

AN: I should warn you that the beginning of this chapter is suddenly and briefly disgusting. If you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip the second and third paragraphs entirely. It's not plot essential, though I thought it made for a short but interesting display of the vastly different interests of Jonathan and Bruce.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Blood.

It was the second thing Bruce noticed. The first was the screaming: anguished, frenzied, and hardly human. It must have started right as he closed the door, because he'd heard nothing before that and the sound was impossible to miss. He looked up, and felt his eyes widen as he took in the scene playing out in front of him.

A man and a woman, though he could only make out the latter clearly, with her writhing on something—a table?—as he thrust against her again and again, and she leaned forward, as if to tear out his throat. A man, held down by another as a woman held what seemed to be his dismembered arm—it happened too quickly for him to be sure—and shoved it into his mouth. Another mouth, this one pulling something from within, either stomach or intestines, presented with other acts too sudden and short for Bruce to make out—though he was sure that they were all unspeakable—and everyone shrieking and covered in blood.

He managed to tear his gaze away from the television screen when he registered a mutilated man, holding out his own eyes—severed—as if in supplication, and reflected that he'd seen every Bond film at least three times, and none of them had a scene like _that_. How Jonathan was still lying on the couch, apparently asleep, was beyond him. Even without the visual, the noise was enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck.

It stopped, abruptly as it had begun, and Bruce risked glancing back at the television. The carnage was gone, replaced by other actors, looking sane if stricken. Jonathan chose that moment to awaken, and sat up with a yawn. "You're back? What time is it?"

"Three." Around three, anyway. Definitely too early to be watching whatever he'd just witnessed.

He rubbed one eye with the back of his hand, glancing at the screen. He moved his eyes back to Bruce without turning his head, stiffened slightly, and looked at the television again. "Oh. Missed the best part, then."

"What _is _this?" It had to be a DVD, because the light on the player was illuminated, but it wasn't anything he'd ever purchased. He was sure that Alfred didn't have a collection of gory horror films hidden somewhere in the manor. Fairly sure, at least.

"One of mine." He held the remote out, paused the film. "There's only so much secret agent action I can take at a time, Batman."

He'd forgotten that he'd brought the DVDs along with everything else. "Why didn't you just sleep? You're obviously tired."

"_You're _telling _me _to get more sleep?" He raised a brow, expression mildly contemptuous.

"I never claimed that my habits were healthy." This was what he got for coming in to check on the man in the first place. He could have just slept. He knew he needed it, much as he tried to deny that particular need. But the same logic that reminded him of how badly he was abusing his body pointed out that leaving a mental patient alone with DVDs—that could be broken to gain a cutting edge—alone for a few hours was a terrible idea, let alone for the whole night. So here he was.

"I would hope not. Considering how you jump off rooftops and launch your Batmobile in front of rocket-propelled grenades."

"It's called a Tumbler," he said, as patiently as he could at three-something in the morning. "And is there a reason you're pretending to be Jonathan?"

Scarecrow froze again, the hate in his eyes switching from a dim, ember-like glow to a conflagration. To his credit, his shock was only visible for an instant before he buried it, slipping into his standard smirk. "I'd hardly call it pretending. If you can tell us apart, then there's no need for me to clarify, is there?"

Bruce decided against pointing out that he'd been imitating Jonathan's usual mannerisms and veiling his sarcasm, something he'd never done before. He doubted it would lead anywhere helpful, especially not at this hour. "How does sleep work between you in the first place? You can't sleep independently of each other, can you?" He was unsure as to how the Scarecrow voice could sleep at all, but maybe there were periods of time when it fell silent. An occasion such as that would make speaking to Jonathan much easier.

Scarecrow's eyes sparkled in a way that suggested malice more than mirth. "That's an interesting question. A better one, though, would be "what on Earth makes you think I'll answer that, Batman?""

"I'm trying to make your life less difficult." He'd only explained that roughly five hundred times to Jonathan. With his luck, he'd have to do it all over again to get through to this one. Oh well. Only four hundred and ninety-nine attempts to go. "So it would be better for the both of us if I had some insight into your mind." As he stood now, even after the few advances, trying to unravel Jonathan Crane was like trying to solve one of the Riddler's riddles, with vague conversations and gestures serving in place of clues. The "other half" wasn't helping matters in the least.

"Men far wiser than you have tried that. And utterly failed." Scarecrow stood. It was striking, how differently he carried himself. Jonathan always had a haughty air to him—unless he was too frightened or mad to keep it up—as though even deigning to talk to someone was bruising his dignity. But there was awkwardness there at the same time, as though he sensed the difference between himself and the rest of humanity, and—rather than the superiority he acted with—felt inferior because of it. He was brilliant and he knew it, but at the same time, he was unsure.

Scarecrow, on the other hand, seemed to feel nothing but confidence and superiority. He _radiated _it, like a beautiful and feral beast that knew he could accomplish whatever he wanted, because all the humans were too afraid of having their throats torn out to stop it. If he felt insecurity—felt _anything _beyond contempt or smug happiness—then he kept it buried within the very core of his being. He was so like the Joker, with only his hatred for Batman and his reserved nature keeping them from serving as mirror images.

"Besides, I highly doubt that a college drop-out will succeed when trained psychiatrists couldn't." He said "drop-out" in the same tone that others might say "serial killer," or "pedophile," brushing past Bruce none-too-gently on his way out the door. "I'm going to sleep. I'd appreciate it if you didn't sneak into the room again."

_Calm. I'm calm, and I'm not going to let him provoke me into losing my temper. _He wasn't sure why the drop-out comments were so irritating, particularly when they came from someone who didn't technically exist, but he was sure that Scarecrow was trying to push him over the edge. To make him lose Jonathan's trust and set everything back at square one. He could endure. "Good night."

"Go to hell."

He bit back the desire to remark on the man's atheism, and headed for the stairs in pursuit of much-needed rest.

* * *

_Damn him damn him _damn _him._

Scarecrow stopped his fist moments before he slammed it through the plaster, body burning with rage he had no way to express. Punching through the wall would do more than just destroy the pretty wallpaper of the hallway—a parchment shade with slightly darker accents—it would also leave cuts on his hand, or at the very least rip the bandages still wrapped there. The Batman would notice.

Notice, and possibly take a closer watch. Or end up re-wrapping his hands, spreading disinfectant over them and letting his fingers trail on Jonathan's skin—

He bit his lip until he tasted blood. Which, now that he thought of it, was likely to leave a visible mark and was a terrible way to deal with this problem regardless. It was like what Jonathan had done to cope with the madness in February, and Scarecrow ought to be above it. Why did he have to be the one to feel the lust? It had been bad enough to feel the tension with no hope of Jonathan relieving it, as he had from puberty onwards, aside from the occasions when it got to be too much for him to handle and he forced Jonathan into a bathroom to deal with it, or when he'd overridden his counterpart and initiated their first sexual encountered with the Joker. Now that he was feeling it for the _Batman_, it somehow managed to be a hundred times worse. Probably because it went against everything he stood for.

Damn Jonathan's great-grandmother to the hell she'd been so fond of talking about for making him associate masturbation with horrific punishment. If they'd had anything resembling a normal sex life, he likely wouldn't be in this predicament.

He forced himself to step away from the wall and stormed back toward the bedroom, intent on burying his face in the sheets and screaming himself hoarse. It was the only thing he could think of that didn't involve causing damage to himself or the Bat's property, and as such it couldn't possibly be satisfying.

He could tell them apart. _The Batman _could tell them apart.

No one could do that. Not Joan, or any of the other doctors. Not the nurses, or the board of directors, or his coworkers when he'd been back at Gotham University, or getting his doctorate. Even his college roommate—they'd been on friendly but awkward terms, and every year after he'd stayed in a single—hadn't noticed, though he lived and conversed with them every day. But maybe that wasn't so surprising, considering that Jonathan's great-grandmother and mother had raised him, and never figured out the difference. His mother was almost excusable, as she'd been as attentive a parent as a mannequin might make, but the great-grandmother had no excuse. Aside from mania.

Not even Jonathan's Arkham friends who knew of Scarecrow's existence could spot the difference, as demonstrated on the night the Joker had threatened to blow up the asylum and Scarecrow had tried to get away while the clown was distracting the Bat. Both Nigma and Harley—_Harley_, Jonathan's first friend that didn't share his body—had addressed him as Jonathan. There was only one exception until a few minutes ago that proved the rule, and that had been the Joker. The Joker, he was willing to accept, because the man read e_veryone _like a book. It made sense when he deciphered the differences between them.

The same could not be said for the Batman, who'd never so much as noticed the discrepancy until it was pointed out to him. If Jonathan hadn't let the cat out of the bag, he'd still be in the dark. Some detective. And yet he could tell, even when Scarecrow was imitating his other half. Jonathan, thankfully, had gone back to sleep as soon as Scarecrow had taken the wheel.

Jonathan could never know. Never.

He'd let himself be fooled by the Joker, as Scarecrow had, to his shame. The Joker, with his insightful observations and false sympathy, had tricked Jonathan into believing that he cared, that he understood Jonathan on a level no one else had ever reached. No one else had ever tried. And Scarecrow had wanted it, just like Jonathan, and let himself be blinded to the truth. They'd opened themselves to the Joker's manipulations, and paid the price, both in physical suffering and emotional agony. Scarecrow knew that Jonathan would never open his heart to the Joker again.

But he also knew that Jonathan was too trusting, and wanted companionship more than anything else. The Joker, Harley…Scarecrow himself had been born for that purpose. And if Jonathan decided that the Batman truly understood him, he would give his trust to the man who ruined his life. There was no question about it. But Scarecrow knew better.

_Fool me twice…_

He wouldn't let it happen. He'd sat back and watched Jonathan suffer for his entire life, and he wasn't about to let it happen again. If the Batman so much as laid a finger on his Jonathan, the man would be missing an arm when he tried to withdraw. That much he knew, and refused to compromise.

* * *

AN: The movie Jonathan's watching at the start of the chapter is called _Event Horizon, _a 1997 British film which is, essentially, _The Shining _in space. It's about a rescue ship coming to the aid of a spacecraft that sent a distress signal, and finding the crew dead, with a malevolent energy lurking on the ship which causes the rescue crew to hallucinate their worst fears (hence why I think Jonathan would like it). It's got little plot/character development, and many of the effects haven't aged well, but when it's scary, it's _scary._


	58. Youtube

AN: You can all thank GreyLiliy for this chapter, as she's the one who put the idea in my head.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan brushed the hair back from his eyes and reflected—as he'd done often enough to lose count—that he needed to get his hands on a pair of scissors, raising the window shade. Between the bars, he could make out the position of the sun; not yet high enough to mark noon, but close. No more than a few hours away, and that was at the most.

He really needed a clock. It was a shame that the hands on an ordinary clock could be pried loose and snapped to make cutting edges, and a digital clock contained sharp metal and could be used to electrocute, besides. Knowing Batman's cautious nature—he still had yet to find anything to remove the GPS, despite his efforts—he'd find issue with a sundial bolted to the floor.

_I suppose I could bash my skull against it. Though the same could be said for the door and the bed frame._

Wonderful. He was becoming a paranoid wreck, too. Just another unwelcome development, one of many. He lowered the shade, and walked to the door, wondering just when he'd started sleeping in. It hadn't been at Arkham, that was certain. The asylum followed a sleep schedule, but even before that, he tended to be an early riser in spite of the insomnia. His latest nights saw him awake around nine-thirty the next morning. The exceptions being the times he lived with the Joker, and he liked to think that was his mind's way of shielding him from as much of the madness as possible.

It could be that the isolation in the cave had thrown his internal clock off balance. Or that he was starting to mimic the Bat's patterns. Which was not only unpleasant, but unhealthy, as it meant varying the times he was getting the antipsychotics. As long as they were in his system, he should be fine, but his mental health was not something he wanted to risk. Not again.

Closing the door behind him, Jonathan stepped into the hallway, and headed for the kitchen. He faltered for a moment, looking at the wallpaper with an odd sense of _déjà vu_ that puzzled him until the memory snapped back into place. Scarecrow had thought something about the wallpaper the previous night, while Jonathan had been sleeping. He must have been drifting in and out of consciousness at that point—a common occurrence, in the early stages of sleep—and picked up on that. What was it about the wallpaper?

_Pretty_. It came flooding back as suddenly as the memory itself. The wallpaper was pretty. And it was, now that he looked at it—a prison was still a prison, but at least this one had nice décor—though it was an odd thought to be coming from Scarecrow, who tended to use "pretty" to describe things such as the blood splatters in _giallo_ films, or the sounds of a test subject screaming. Why he'd suddenly begun to admire interior designing, Jonathan had no idea.

There was no answer from Scarecrow, the emotions from his end of the link despondent and uneasy, though muted. Jonathan couldn't tell if he was mildly upset, or horribly depressed and keeping it hidden as he could. It seemed better not to ask. Scarecrow was always there for him, but he never wanted the favor returned, despite Jonathan's desire to help.

His intent was to find Batman, checking first the kitchen and then the master bedroom, and get his pills. What he was going to do after that, he had no idea. Read something, maybe, or plot escape. He doubted the Bat would be amused to find him sprawled on the couch watching horror again—though it would be entertaining to see the man's reaction to something like _Audition_—and the idea of doing so made him feel more than a bit on edge. It was too comfortable, too domestic. He couldn't allow himself to become at home here. A friendship was one thing. Happiness in slavery would be losing everything he held dear.

As it would turn out, he didn't need to search for Batman, as they met in the hallway, the Bat with a glass of water in one hand and a pill in the other.

"Do you ever work?" He found himself too self-conscious at the process—bad enough when the nurses did it—to be polite, though he refrained from narrowing his eyes as he swallowed. That was something, at least. It was too early for another emotional, draining fight. He'd be happy never to have one again, even if it did mean being degraded like this.

"It's the weekend."

He blushed, entirely against his will. "Life would be much easier if you gave me responsibility of the pills, you know."

Batman made that noncommittal sound so loved by parents and, apparently, vigilante billionaires, used when the answer was "hell no, but I don't want to argue about it." So typical that Jonathan couldn't even get worked up. "Did you want breakfast?"

He shook his head, and for once, the Bat didn't press the issue. Jonathan was tempted to praise him for it, knowing full well that if anyone was the "pet" in this dynamic, it was him, shameful as it was.

"Is there anything you need?"

_An unlimited supply of toxin and a video camera_, Scarecrow thought but did not urge him to say, so Jonathan kept silent. He wasn't sure what had happened last night while he slept, but he got the distinct impression that he didn't want to know, based on his other half's behavior. If there had been a fight, it hadn't been physical. Or, if it had, he hadn't been injured, and Batman appeared to be unharmed.

Strange, how he couldn't picture the Bat causing him harm anymore, no more than he could envision Scarecrow doing damaging to the man in a fistfight. Not long ago, it would have been perfectly easy to imagine, but something in the relationship seemed to have shifted. The friendship, possibly, or the guest-host relationship. Harming a houseguest, even in this day and age, was a severe breach in etiquette.

Part of him, the part nearest Scarecrow, felt that he was letting himself become too comfortable and asking to be hurt. Yet, by and large, that part was overshadowed by the rest of him, who didn't care how low his guard dropped as long as it meant no more screaming and fighting, and almost enjoyed conversing with the man who'd taken his mind and prestige in one fell swoop.

He shook his head.

"I have an idea," Batman said, slowly, almost hesitantly. "Something I think you'd like."

Scarecrow commented that that choice of words sounded like something a child molester would use to lure in a target. Jonathan, who could have gone for a long and happy time without that visual, didn't speak, waiting for him to finish.

"Would you like to see?"

He found his voice. His throat had gone dry, despite his attempts to relax, to remind himself that the last thing Batman showed him had been the library, and that hadn't been bad at all. Quite the contrary, actually. "What is it?"

"Come on." The Bat extended a hand to him and Jonathan found himself taking it—realizing as he did that this was the first time Batman had offered his hand to lead him, since yesterday he'd taken his hand instead of giving Jonathan the choice—allowing himself to be guided. He felt a flare of rage from Scarecrow that ended abruptly as his other half closed the link, and felt apprehension building again. Despite their friendship, the fact remained that Batman was hardly stable and his ideas of what Jonathan would like could and in all likelihood would be very different from Jonathan's own preferences.

He expected to be led upstairs, but instead Batman brought him back to the kitchen. Sitting on the table was the Bat's laptop, and it was both turned on and logged in.

* * *

"What is that for?"

Jonathan had a talent for scrutinizing even the most harmless of objects, with such caution and deliberateness that he managed to look in fear for his life. Bruce had never seen anyone give a laptop such a suspicious glance before. Come to think of it, before this, he'd never seen anyone give a laptop a suspicious glance at all.

"It's for you. Here." He pulled out the chair in front of the computer, and Jonathan sat, though he did so slowly.

"You said it's for me. I doubt that this is a gift." There was no trace of sarcasm to his voice, just observation. Bruce wondered if the man was aware that his manner of speech was so alienating, or if he'd even care. Regardless, it was one of his lesser problems, and not worth getting into now.

"No. But I'm letting you use it, for now."

Jonathan glanced at him, confused, and clicked the Internet icon, opening his eyes wider as the GCN webpage came up. "You're giving me Internet access?" His wondrous expression was immediately replaced by one of disgust, most likely with himself for bringing the issue to Bruce's attention.

"Yes. But just to one site." He moved Jonathan's hands, gently, out of the way, clicking the address bar and typing in the destination.

The page loaded, and Jonathan blinked again. "Youtube?"

"Yes."

"Do you want me to entertain myself with—" he paused, staring at the site's featured videos. "Reality TV clips and video game demos?"

"No." This time, he clicked on the site's search bar, typed "Jonathan Crane," and hit enter. A second or so later, the page loaded, with the top result and each one visible below it relating to Gotham's mad psychiatrist. "But I thought you might like this."

It was said in the Bible that the faces of those who spoke to God began to take the deity's likeness, shining brightly. So it had been when Moses came down from the mountain bearing the Ten Commandments, and so it was with Jonathan's face now. Shining was the only way to describe it, glowing with happiness as if there was a light source embedded beneath his skin.

And to think that Bruce had been worried he might view this offer as insulting.

Wordless—though his mouth worked as if he wanted to say something—Jonathan reached out, movements slow but not shaking, and clicked the first link, a GCN report on his first arrest after the Narrows poisoning. It was little more than a recap of that night's events, and news of his capture, without any recorded footage of the man himself, but Jonathan sat rapt with attention, hanging to every word as if he was hearing something incredible, life-changing.

Bruce felt a twinge of nervousness again, watching Jonathan as opposed to the screen, waiting for any sign of agitation. He had poisoned the water supply and released an unspeakable nightmare onto a third of the city—the fact that he'd only intended to ransom it wasn't widely know, or absolving—and had no qualms about torturing the inmates he was meant to help. Nothing on the broadcasts about him was going to be complimentary, and several wouldn't even attempt to be unbiased. Bruce couldn't imagine that he'd take that well.

He did.

If Bruce had gone by expression alone, he wouldn't have realized Jonathan felt any angry whatsoever for his portrayal in the media. Only his occasional mutters of "idiots" or "what do you know?" betrayed his irritation. He viewed the video with the same gleeful smile as a child watching Saturday morning cartoons, though his was more subdued—if only just. He looked almost giddy, as though seconds away from a giggling fit, with such enthusiasm that Bruce nearly smiled back, in spite of himself. Yes, hurting people in the name of science or money was wrong and taking pleasure in the attention it brought was sickening, but when Jonathan was acting similarly to a child proudly waving a high-scoring assignment back and forth in front of a parent, it was almost impossible not to feel happiness by proxy.

It was kept in check, thankfully. Partially by disgust; he was excited about _ruining lives_, after all, and would surely continue his "research" if given the chance, and partially by melancholy. _This_ made Jonathan Crane happy. Watching himself be feared and reviled gave him joy. Bruce had thought before, half-jokingly, that Jonathan's desire to see the broadcast footage gave an insight into his fractured mind, but he hadn't realized just how accurate that assessment was until he was watching it unfold in front of him.

"They're talking about me," Jonathan murmured. Bruce had no idea if he was being addressed, or the man was speaking to himself.

He nodded, to no response. The clip ended, and Jonathan immediately clicked on a related link, giving it the same undivided attention that he'd given the first clip. Bruce began to wonder if this was at all healthy.

Certainly, it was depressing. Jonathan appeared to be so desperate for recognition that he'd revel in even negative attention, so long as it meant someone was thinking about him. He wasn't sure if that was a byproduct of narcissism or an effect of upbringing—Jonathan's files were sparse on childhood information—but either way, it was upsetting. Yes, he had ruined so many lives, and surely indirectly ended some, but to see brilliance so broken and ill-used was just tragic.

He wondered if Jonathan had ever realized that he could have had all the respect and approval he wanted, if only he'd used his genius to help instead of harm. It would almost be better if he was too far gone to know that.

Jonathan was oblivious to Bruce's reverie, clicking link after link, smile never faltering until he moved the cursor to one and paused. "What's this?" His tone was no longer ecstatic as it had been, bizarrely, while he insulted the broadcasts, but nor was it angry. Not yet.

Bruce moved to stand beside Jonathan's chair and glanced at the screen. The arrow was hovering over a video entitled "Batman apprehends Scarecrow" and the footage still was black and white, and fuzzy, as if from a low quality camera. It was a picture he'd seen often on the news, though not for several months. "That's from last February. When I brought you back to Arkham."

Jonathan stared, still not clicking. "Then this is from—"

"The asylum's security cameras. It was on the news." For weeks, he did not add.

"How—"

"One of the employees gave—well, probably sold—the footage."

His euphoric look gone, Jonathan finally moved his eyes from the screen and stared at Bruce. It was still Jonathan, that much he knew, but he couldn't read the expression in his eyes. "So this is real?"

"Yes."

Wordless, Jonathan looked back to the monitor and clicked the link.

* * *

AN: Giallo films are sort of a cross between traditional horror and slasher films. "Gore as art," you could say.

_Audition _is said to be one of the most disturbing horror films ever, and I've never watched it because even hearing about it makes me hyperventilate. Read the plot summary on Wikipedia before you even think of watching it. Your sanity thanks you in advance.


	59. Security Tape

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

He was at a loss to explain why Batman had allowed him to use the laptop.

True, it was under supervision, and the Bat was hovering right behind him, fully capable of grabbing, tackling, or pulling Jonathan away from the monitor should he try to do anything suspect, but still. The man had the foresight to disconnect his phone lines, but Internet access was perfectly acceptable? It was still a tool for communication and information, though the majority of its users tended to utilize it as a medium for viewing pornography.

It was most likely a device to gain trust. Judging from Scarecrow's mood, there'd been an argument of some sort the previous night, and this was Batman's way of apologizing for it. He'd had the machine waiting, after all, and suggested the thing he knew Jonathan was eager to see. It was an obvious manipulation of his emotions to gain a desired result—complacency—and that he'd tried it on a psychiatrist was laughable.

Not that Jonathan wasn't immensely appreciative about the whole thing.

He expected Scarecrow to object, tell him that he was playing right into the Bat's scheme, but his other half remained silent and moody as ever. In spite of himself, Jonathan was almost grateful for that. He'd wanted to watch this sort of thing for a long while, but never had the chance. Arkham didn't allow re-captured inmates to read the news reports about their escapes, for fearing of encouraging, and Internet access was never his greatest concern on the run. But now he had the chance, and it was as satisfying as he hoped it would be, even if the news anchors were idiots who couldn't grasp his vision and declined any journalistic investigation of his motives in favor of focusing on the frightening, gritty details. That wasn't important.

The recognition was.

It might have been selfish, but it was true. Anyway, everyone wanted recognition in some way or another. Be it through innovation, attention-seeking, or just having children to leave a legacy behind, there wasn't a person on Earth who hadn't sought fifteen minutes of fame at one point or another. Humans were simply selfish beings. It was necessary to survival. And Jonathan was only human, even if his intellect was far beyond anyone else's.

But this next video wasn't about recognition, not if it was purely security footage. He wasn't sure, even as he clicked the link, why he felt compelled to watch it. True, the footage had been broadcast, but without a commentary to case it, it was like a photograph lying in a pile. There was nothing to set it apart from the rest, unless it was separated and framed. Yet he felt compelled to watch.

He felt anxiety flooding him, enough to cause discomfort, as the page began to load, ads and links appearing before the video proper. Which was ridiculous; what had happened in February had never come up again, after everyone had been returned to Arkham, and whatever he saw now wasn't going to change the past. It was just Batman, dragging him back to the asylum as he did with everyone else, and only a minute's worth of footage. But, as with all irrational fears, the knowledge that it was ridiculous did nothing to assuage it.

Now that he thought about it, that was likely due to the loss of memory.

He remembered the events of the madness last February about as well as he remembered the events of the madness he'd just come out of. While the nightmarish imagery was vividly imprinted in his memory, the actual events were gone, apart from a few flashes of recollection that he may or may not have dreamt. It was like trying to remember a movie viewed under the influence of LSD; impossible to separate the real events from the trip. Being confronted with something that should be familiar but wasn't always made for an unsettling moment. If _déjà vu _didn't illicit discomfort, no one would give it a second thought.

The video itself appeared, taking a second or so to load before it began to play.

It began with a view of the asylum's parking lot, showing the section that opened to the road, the gates just barely visible in the gray background. The camera over the front doors, then. Obvious now, considering that he did remember being brought to Joan at the front desk, and Batman was hardly going to try pushing an hallucinating, injured man through a window, but he had no recollection as to which door they'd come through, even while watching this. Jonathan noted that the quality was much better than one tended to see on security footage; odd, considering that video hosting sites slowed the rate of frames per second, among other things that usually lowered image quality.

_Though Batman said this was broadcast. _News stations worked with grainy, amateur footage all the time. He supposed it was only logical that they'd be able to filter the images somehow, make them cleaner.

And then they appeared onscreen, and he stopped analyzing, completely immersed in the sight before him.

The recording didn't flow, rather moving like a series of photos flashing in rapid succession, leaving a brief pause between movements. Even with the stilt to the video, it was readily apparent that he was a wreck. He wasn't able to stand properly, leaning against Batman. _Clinging _to the vigilante's arm for support. There was something dark draped around his shoulders that he took as a blanket until he realized that Batman's cape was missing from his armor.

_He gave me his cape?_

He could make out, as they moved closer, the bloody mess that was his left hand, the right holding the cloak around him, and that arm interlocking with Batman's. He wasn't, as he realized with a sudden flush of heat to his face, just using the man for the support to walk upright. Jonathan was almost _hugging _him, too far gone to preserve his dignity or realize whom he was holding for dear life. He watched, mortified but transfixed, as he clung to the Bat, stumbling forwards, tripping at one point—

—To be immediately caught by Batman, before he could stumble more than a foot forward, before he'd truly begun to fall. It was like an out of body experience, watching himself in this bizarre sequence that he had no memory of, clinging to what, at the time, was his worst enemy. His worst enemy who was uprighting him after the trip, carefully taking his injured hand and studying it, probably to ensure that he hadn't made the damage worse when he slipped. He watched, the heat refusing to drain from his face, as Batman let go of his wrist, readjusting the cape on his shoulders, before moving again. He couldn't be sure thanks to the pauses, but it seemed as if they were walking at a slower rate when they started back up.

And then it was over, the screen going black for a moment before the recommended links appeared upon it. Jonathan didn't move to click any of them, still as enraptured as he'd been with the video playing, though now by in his own thoughts.

_He…helped me._

He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting. For Batman to drag him inside by the collar, maybe, or have him thrown over one shoulder. Not something violent, necessarily, but not…involved that way. He had been _caring_, even with the asylum doors within a few yards, when the guards must have been in view and he could have made Jonathan their problem. But he hadn't. He'd helped him when he'd tripped, and beyond that, checked for damage. All while Jonathan was shaking and probably whimpering, too frightened to do anything but cry.

He'd been so patient_._

Jonathan made the mistake of glancing backward at the man standing behind him, meeting his eyes. He turned away almost immediately, but not quickly enough to block out the rush of emotion that came when they made eye contact.

It was the same way he'd felt during the happier moments with the Joker.

_Shit._

* * *

"Jonathan?"

Jonathan, who'd turned his head in the opposite direction quickly enough to risk whiplash, made a stiff nodding motion, which Bruce took as an indication that he was listening. "Are you all right?"

Another stiff nod. He was most definitely not all right. _Hell._ Too much, too fast. He should never have suggested the videos. It was feeding into the narcissism, and beyond that, it appeared to have caused a mild panic attack. At the very least, he should have known not to let him see the security footage. For someone as obsessed with recognition and respect as Jonathan Crane, seeing himself so helpless would be almost traumatizing.

He was really a complete idiot when it came to dealing with this man.

Pressing the issue would just make things more awkward, and was likely to further remind Jonathan of his dependency. So he stayed silent, the minutes ticking by, painfully slow.

"Why is it that every time I decide to make use of the kitchen, one of you has set up camp here?"

He raised his head as Alfred stepped through the doorway, then glanced back to Jonathan to find that he hadn't turned at all. "Because food is essential for life?"

"That only works as an explanation if you're eating. You, on the other hand—" he crossed to the table, glancing at the laptop. "You appear to be watching videos of the night when he bled all over your cape. I suppose I should be glad that someone got entertainment value from that."

Bruce expected Jonathan to fire back something equally dry and politely insulting—though if the voice in head decided to speak through him again, it would be anything but polite—but he didn't. He remained stiffly seated, head tilted slightly down, and silent.

"He didn't bleed on it that much," Bruce countered, both to avoid provoke Jonathan into slipping deeper into…whatever this was, and to defend his first aid skills. The bandaging hadn't been that bad.

"You're not the one who has to wash it, Master Wayne. That was the final straw that motivated me to start Scotchgarding the armor."

That would explain a lot about the lack of stains the suit accumulated. _What else does he add to my equipment that I don't know about? _He shrugged, watching Jonathan for any change in his condition. "What were you planning on making?"

"I hadn't decided." He opened the refrigerator, examining the contents. "Any requests?"

"No. Jonathan?"

Jonathan straightened, startled. "What?"

"Did you want any particular food?"

"Oh." He slumped back down again, avoiding eye contact with either of them. "No."

Alfred closed the door, giving Jonathan the same concerned and mildly irritated look one might give to a cat that was threatening to cough up a hairball on an expensive rug. "Are you all right, Dr. Crane?"

He gave another forced nod, brushing his hair forward so that it covered his face.

Fantastic. _I broke him. _He stood, holding his hands up to gesture confusion in response to Alfred's questioning look. To which Alfred responded _I warned you that letting madmen stay in the house was a bad idea, _without actually speaking. Thank God he didn't know that Bruce had been willing to return Jonathan to Arkham, only to be persuaded out of it by Jonathan's begging. If he found that out, Jonathan would be back at the hospital within the next ten minutes, and Bruce would never hear the end of it for as long as he lived.

He moved to the laptop and turned it off, doing his best to ignore the way Jonathan leaned away as he did. He picked up the device, motioning for Jonathan to stand. "Come on. Let's give Alfred the kitchen back." Jonathan made a noise of consent, faintly, and stood, stepping back as he did. Wordless, he followed Bruce, keeping the same distance he'd observed when he'd been acting like an imprinted bird. One step forward, one hundred back. He was beginning to think that Gotham was built over a malicious, otherworldly entity that destroyed every chance at happiness. Every day he spent here made the idea that much less far-fetched.

He stopped, turned around. Jonathan, looking steadfastly at the floor with his hair still in his face, continued to move for a few steps, nearly colliding into him before he realized what was going on and stopped, scrambling back another step.

"Are you sure nothing's wrong?" He hoped the concern in his voice was evident as intended, and the frustration was not.

"I'm fine." It sounded as if he was fighting to get the words out.

He wondered if the Scarecrow was talking. Certainly, Jonathan had had a difficult time speaking when Scarecrow was screaming at him, but that seemed to be from the pain of the volume and not actual distraction. Maybe they were having a conversation. But the conversations, from what Bruce had observed, made him stop talking altogether. He wasn't sure if Jonathan could speak during the conversation at all.

Whatever it was, he doubted asking about it right now would be at all productive.

"Okay. You can tell me if you're not."

Jonathan made a sound that could be either "uh-huh" or "nuh-uh." Or possibly just a noise. Why did the setbacks have to affect his communication abilities? Bruce would almost prefer the madness to this. At least when he was raving, he was speaking, even if the words made no sense.

It occurred to him that he was feeling genuine concern for the man. Not that he hadn't before—he'd never _wanted _him to act semi-comatose, or hallucinate voices and birds attacking him from within his mind—but it was different now. It wasn't a professional worry or even a natural one. He felt worried for him in the same way he might worry for Alfred or Lucius, though not as intensely. Yet another sign that they were truly friends, for better or worse.

Knowing his luck, it would be for worse.

He nodded, and started to walk again. He didn't need to tell Jonathan to follow. He simply trailed behind, as he had so often before. As if he was getting sicker. And though he knew it would be better to separate himself from this, Bruce couldn't keep himself from being concerned.

He led Jonathan to the library, and left him there, hoping that reading would help him to relax, get through whatever latest experience had shaken him up. And hoping that he would be able to detach himself, if it didn't.

* * *

AN: Scotchgarding is the process of covering fabric, among other things, with a protective coating.


	60. With a Little Help From My Friends

AN: And it's time for another fic suggestion from yours truly. Remember _Not Playing with a Full Deck_? Well, the author, 4ofCups, has another creative and fantastic endeavor, _mY fAVoritE tHinGS_. It's a one-shot reimagining of the song of the same name from _The Sound of Music, _and it is wonderful.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

_Books. _Jonathan forced himself to stop pacing aimlessly, as he'd been doing since Batman left him in the library, though he couldn't stop wringing his hands. Both actions added to his stress rather than decreasing it, and through his panic, he was just able to realize that if he got any more worked up, he'd be seriously risking cardiac arrest.

_I am in a room full of books, _he reminded himself, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. It was a technique Joan had always suggested, one he'd resented at first but had adopted at some point during his captivity. Probably while he was losing his grip on sanity and was too focused on not going mad to care whom the advice had come from. It had no discernable effect.

He reached out without opening his eyes, resting a hand on the shelf in front of him. His fingers made contact with the spine of a book, and he pressed against it as if to reaffirm its presence. Research was his primary escape from the distressing parts of life, and had been since he was able to get his hands on chemicals, but reading was his first release, and he'd returned to it during Scarecrow's absence.

If there was ever a moment he needed distraction, it was now.

He closed his hand around the book beneath it, opening his eyes as he pulled it from the shelf. _The Tale of Genji._

_Hell. _He replaced it, examining the surrounding novels with a sinking feeling. As he'd found from his last excursion into the library of Wayne Manor, the books weren't arranged in alphabetical order, be it by title or author. Rather, they were arranged by genre. And as the presence of novels like _Rebecca _and _Tropic of Cancer _confirmed, he was standing in front of the romantic works.

_Goddamn it._

_Jonathan. _Scarecrow, so sudden and unexpected that it made him jump. His voice wasn't harsh or angry as Jonathan had expected. He'd assumed the continued silence after the revelation that his other half was experiencing…feelings for Batman was a sign of burning rage or loathing, but either he'd been wrong or Scarecrow was doing a wonderful job of hiding it. _It's all right._

_No. It's not. There's nothing all right about this. Nothing._

_Jonathan. _The tension was audible that time, though he tried to hide it. _Relax._

* * *

"I _am _relaxed."

Harley could tell from Pam's expression that she wasn't falling for it, and stood, holding in a shout of frustration as she stepped away from the couch and toward the other side of the rec room. She had nowhere to go, nothing to do except worry and try not to tear her hair out while she did.

On the television, the news report had ended, and the next program—a soap opera, or daytime drama, or whatever they were calling themselves these days—was starting up. Another news broadcast. Another day with no news on either of them, the Joker or Jonathan.

To say that it was driving her mad would be such an obvious and idiotic observation that it might just go full circle and become brilliant and astute.

"Harley." Pam's hand was on her shoulder. Her fists clenched as she resisted the urge to walk off, or brush her away. It would only make life more complicated later, and she was trying to help, overbearing and useless as it was. "They'll come back. They always do."

"They've never been gone for this long," she countered, wrenching her pigtails in her hands. It was a wonder her hair hadn't fallen out yet, or at least grayed, considering all the stress she'd been under and the strain she was putting on it. "Maybe from Arkham, but not from the rest of the city. Mistah J hasn't done anything in weeks—_weeks, _Red. Are you tellin' me that's normal?"

She heard the faint change in Pam's breathing, as if she'd been about to say something but thought better of it, and resisted the urge to rip out all that gorgeous red hair and shove it down her throat. She couldn't care less about the Joker. She _hated _him, and made no secret of that fact. All she cared about was Jonathan.

Which wasn't to say that he wasn't important too. He was; he'd been Harley's first friend in the institution and she was worried to the point of physical illness for him as well. And unlike the Joker and his news broadcast, no one had heard from Jonathan since his escape. Maybe he was lying low. He did love research, after all, and to carry it out, he had to stay hidden. But he'd vanished from the face of the earth and in Gotham, that usually meant one thing. One horrible thing.

She untangled her hands from her hair and found herself biting her nails. And to think that she'd once berated Jonathan for such a disgusting habit. She'd give anything to have him back now, to have both of them back, bloody cuticles and all.

* * *

Jonathan tasted blood, though he was unable to keep himself from biting. He couldn't remember the last time he'd chewed on his nails to the point of drawing blood. They'd been intact for the most part when he last readjusted to the meds, so the sedatives must have kept him from biting, and before that he'd left them relatively untouched—the hyperawareness of that prescription made the taste and texture of nail biting too vile to be worth it—so it might have been February. Or the time in between then and his imprisonment here, when the Joker had regained his friendship. That had been stressful, but he couldn't recall if he'd bitten or not.

A stupid concern, too insignificant to waste time worrying about. But it was better than focusing on the actual issue. It wasn't just plausible that doing that would cause a breakdown. It was likely.

_Breathe, Jonathan. _Scarecrow's annoyance was detectable through his concern, though the latter outweighed the former. _It's all right. I promise. It's not that bad._

_Yes, it is! I have feelings for Batman! _He swallowed, the blood sliding down his throat adding to the nausea. Admitting it, even in his thoughts, made it that much worse. His mind had all but shut down at this point, like all but the most basic programs on a computer freezing up. _There is _nothing _all right about that._

_Maybe you're—_

_I'm _not _mistaken. Don't you think I wish I was? _He was biting the skin around his nails now, the bandages on his hands grazing his face. That sensation gave him the push to stop, remembering that the Bat would see the damage he was doing. _Shit. _He couldn't handle being in close proximity to Batman again, as he'd have to be if the man wanted to bandage the new wounds.

_Okay. _Scarecrow sighed, gently lowering their arms. _You have feelings for him. You're sure of that, and I believe you. But that doesn't mean that you need to tear yourself apart like this._

_I'm not doing it on purpose! _God, he didn't _want_ to feel this. He couldn't _let _himself feel this. The last person he'd felt this for was the Joker, and he'd promised himself never to let that happen again. But the sensation he'd felt when he looked at the Bat was identical, and it came back every time he thought of the man. And he couldn't make it leave, no matter how badly he wanted to.

* * *

"I can't just turn off my feelings." Her eyes stung, threatening to form tears that she refused to let out.

"No one's asking you to." There were hands on her shoulders again, but this time they were Edward's, and his grip was too firm for her to pull away. Not that she tried. They weren't going to leave her alone, and any attempt to leave would be met with more concern. "We're in this together, Harley."

"We're all worried. But we can't dwell on it."

Harley raised her head then, glaring at Pam and wondering if she could kick her in the mouth from her current, sitting position. "What do you expect me to do, ignore the fact that they're missing?"

"Of course not." She opened her mouth to say something else before stopping, raising her eyes—almost certainly to meet Edward's. She pushed her hair behind her shoulders, visibly composing herself before she went on. "But you're hurting yourself by obsessing over it, and that doesn't help them any more than ignoring it would."

This must be how Jonathan felt when she'd tried to counsel him after breaking him out of Arkham. "Don't try to control my grieving process."

"If everybody minded their own business," said Jervis, who up to that point had been sitting in blessed silence, "the world would go round a deal faster than it does."

"Which would _not _be an advantage," Edward countered, moving around Harley's chair to sit on the sofa in front of her, beside Pam. "Harley, the Joker is all right. He broke his legs, didn't he? Maybe he's just giving himself a chance to recover before he tries anything strenuous."

She shook her head, sniffing. "He wouldn't care about something like that."

"So he probably disregarded his recovery and injured himself again to the point that he had to care about it." Pam said it flatly, almost spitefully, and the second after she'd finished her hand flew to her mouth, eyes widening in shock at what she'd said. In that same second, Harley lowered her head to her knees, unable to hold back tears. To her credit, she keep them silent, if only to keep the orderlies from coming over.

"Harley, I didn't mean—"

"He could be dead! They could both be _dead_." All of them had their hands on her now, hugging and holding and trying to get her to relax, but it didn't matter. They could cuddle and reassure all they wanted, tell her it would be fine, but it _wasn't _fine, and no platitudes or gestures could make it otherwise.

* * *

_I didn't say you were fine. _Scarecrow's tone was soothing, but it did little to relieve him. _I know that you're not. But it's going to be okay, I promise._

_No, it won't. _He sank to the floor, still in the middle of the romance section and still miserable as ever. _I…like him. In a way that isn't platonic. I've felt this before, and I'm not mistaken, no matter how much I wish otherwise. I _like _the man who poisoned me. None of this is okay._

_It's natural._

He'd never expected to hear _that _from Scarecrow, and it startled him enough to end his panic, if only for a moment. _What?_

_It's natural. He's providing for you, even if you are a prisoner, and he helped you back to sanity while I was gone. He acts exactly the opposite of how the Joker treated you, so it's only natural that you'd care for him. You can't help being human._

_I…I don't care how natural it is. _He stared at his hands, the blood on his fingertips already turning brownish as it dried. _I don't like it. I don't want to feel it._

_You don't have to act on it. _Scarecrow's hands were on his shoulders, then wrapped around him in a tight embrace. _No one ever has to know, least of all him. You don't poison everyone you dislike, and you don't have to have romantic encounters with everyone you feel for. You can hide it._

_Hide it? _He thought back to the moment in the kitchen, when he'd first realized this damn feeling. He hadn't been able to so much as _look _at Batman, let alone speak. It was as bad as it had been when he'd been trying to prove his independence while unable to stop following his captor around. How was he supposed to hide this? The Bat had already noticed something was wrong.

_I'll help you. I can talk to him. _He felt Scarecrow shift uncomfortably, but he went on as confidently as before. _Maybe not all the time, but I can. I'll be there when you need me. He never has to know. It won't be like with the Joker._

_It can't be. _No matter how deeply he'd buried it, there was still a part of him that felt for the Joker, still wanted to cry when he thought of the "break up." He couldn't let himself be hurt again, or humiliated. He couldn't help but love the Joker on some level, after the experiences the man had given him, but he refused to have a piece of him that endlessly loved Batman.

* * *

"I love them," Harley muttered, wiping her face with the handkerchief Jervis had provided. Where he'd gotten it, she had no idea, but she was hardly in a state to care. "It's not just Mistah J. I love both of them."

"There's nothing wrong with that," Pam assured her, as if they didn't know of her animosity toward the Joker. Her arms were around Harley, refusing to let go even after Edward and Jervis had sat back down. "You shouldn't hide your feelings. Or feel that you have to."

"Isn't that exactly what you wanted?" Rude, she knew, outright nasty considering that Pam had her best interests at heart, even if she had no idea what those were. She was becoming a complete bitch, but she was too overpowered by her concern to care.

"No." Edward took her free hand, looked her directly in the eye. "Harley, no one is saying that you should hide what you feel. We just want you to know that you're not alone, and you shouldn't feel isolated in your worry."

"I know." She sniffed, bringing the handkerchief to her face again. "I'm sorry. It's just—it's so hard."

"It is." There was no pandering in his tone, no sign that he was trying to placate her. He wasn't trying to be reassuring, for once, letting his own fear show. It was a wakeup call that carried all the force of a freight train, and Harley felt disgusted with herself for wallowing in self-pity. "But it's harder alone."

"I've got an idea." Pam stood, finally releasing Harley from her grasp. "Let's all do something else, all right? Something enjoyable. As a distraction."

"In that case," Jervis said, straightening his hat, "I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies."

Harley rolled her eyes and got up as well, Edward releasing her hand as she did. _I can do this. _She had to be strong, so that the Joker wouldn't think her a coward when he returned. So that she could help Jonathan through whatever he was going through. And to keep from alienating everyone else she needed to support her. It was love that was making her panic, but she had to restrain herself out of that same love.

* * *

_Love._

Why had he thought that? "A piece of him that endlessly _loved _Batman." Not liked, loved. Why had he thought that?

Scarecrow was asking him something, concern growing in his voice as his other half remained silent, but he couldn't bring himself to respond, too caught up in his poor choice of words to reply. _Loved. _It was ridiculous. Beyond that, it was sickening, loving the man who'd destroyed his mind.

And yet he'd thought it.

No. It was idiotic and he refused to tolerate anything else on top of his current situatioon. _It was a mistake. It doesn't mean anything. I don't love Batman. I do not._

_Do I?_

* * *

AN: As always, Jervis's lines come from Lewis Carroll. As does the Riddler's response to his first quote.


	61. Help

AN: And here I am sending mixed signals, saying I'll never update on Mondays and doing just that. Though I wouldn't be updating today if I hadn't had a class cancelled this morning, which left me with more time to write.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Scarecrow held his hands out, examining the blood on his fingers. There wasn't a lot of it—his skin was splattered like a Jackson Pollock painting as opposed to being drenched in red—but beneath the blood, there were a lot of cuts. Tiny ones, but deep. Experimentally, he closed his hands into fists, lowered his hands to his sides.

The blood was still visible on his knuckles.

_That's just what I needed. Another thing for the Batman to worry about._ He couldn't remember the last time Jonathan had massacred his fingers this badly, psychosis aside. Middle school—no, high school, though he'd only done it once or twice, in times of stress so great as to cause breakdowns. He'd figured out early on that hand injuries made it harder—and more painful—to do things like farm work or climbing up various objects to hide from his more violent classmates. So they'd regressed to the same level of emotional control he'd had as a teenager. That didn't bode well.

Scarecrow raised his hands again, wiping at the blood on one with the fingertips of the other. Still too wet to flake off. He debated between licking it away or waiting for it to dry, wondering how long it had been since the Batman left. Was there a clock in here? He stood, ignored the pain in his hands as he used them to brace himself, and walked away from the book shelves, back to the empty space presumably used for reading. The laptop had shown the time, he had a rough estimate of how long it took to walk here, and the Bat would probably leave them alone for at least an hour. Two was pushing it, considering Jonathan's less than subtle behavior when he'd panicked.

There was no clock.

_Of course. Because that would just make things too easy._ He thought about leaving the library and finding a bathroom to wash off the injuries, but he had no idea where anything was in this damn tower—the fact that the Batman was disgusting rich enough to have _towers _on his mansion still made him ill—and the last thing he needed was for the Bat to find him wandering aimlessly while bloody. He sighed as loudly as he possibly could without making it a scream, clenching his hands into fists again. He did not want to be _calm. _He didn't want to _deal _with this. What he wanted was to slam his head against the nearest flat surface until either blunt trauma or blood loss forced this latest of complications out of his mind.

Jonathan was supposed to be the reserved one, the superego. Scarecrow had the street smarts, dirty tricks, and little fighting ability they had, but he wasn't meant to be responsible. He was the id, the wild, unrestrained side that made things better by having the fun Jonathan wouldn't allow himself to have and comforting him when he couldn't cope on his own. Scarecrow had no idea where their ego was. As far as he knew, they didn't have one.

How was he supposed to deal with this? As if his problem wasn't enough. Being in close proximity with the man was bad enough when the way he smiled, or moved, or even said things could cause very unwelcome—and very obvious, should the Bat ever glance down—reactions. And now Jonathan would be having less carnal but still intense thoughts, and whatever romantic visions popped into his head would drift over to Scarecrow's. That was the last thing he needed. More fetish fuel. God help him if Jonathan found something besides the Batman's hands to lust after.

He was going to have to start masturbating on a daily basis. Otherwise he'd go mad.

_I'm sorry._

_Don't be. _He tried flaking the blood off again. There were a few places dry enough for that to work. The cuts beneath them were red and irritated, but not nearly as noticeable. He hoped so, anyway. _It's not your fault that the Batman looks like a goddamn Casanova._

_What?_

Hell. Letting his own fantasies slip into their conversations was hardly going to help. _Nothing. He has a "helping people" thing. It's not your fault that it appeals to you._

_What if he finds out?_

_He won't. _He hoped he sounded surer than he felt, which was not at all. Thick as the Batman could be, and slow as he was to deduce the incredibly obvious, he'd always managed to arrive at it so far. And it didn't matter if the Bat found the truth through investigation or through stumbling onto it and having it hit him in the face. He still found out.

Jonathan was similarly disillusioned. _But what if—_

_It will be all right, _he said, slowly and patiently, and with enough fervor that he almost believed it himself. _Relax. If you just stay calm, and we keep it hidden, then he never has to know. You've hidden _me _from birth until earlier this week, haven't you? _Not always _well, _particularly in the last days before the exposure, but no one he'd wanted to keep the secret from had ever found out until now.

_Yes._

_Then you can definitely hide something you just started to feel._

Jonathan nodded his assent, though it felt half-hearted. Scarecrow chose to ignore the low morale, and went back to scraping at dried blood. He watched the flakes drift to the carpet, barely visible against the dark and intricate pattern. He found himself wishing that the blood was fresh, and the carpet white, so that he could mar it, hurt it, take something from the Batman the way the Bat was taking from him.

Not that it would matter. For someone so rich, replacing the carpet would be like buying a pack of gum.

One hand was nearly clean now, with the blood only remaining around the nails, where the wounds were the deepest and likely to reopen if he scratched. There was blood under what was left of the nails, but there was nothing he could do about it. The other hand was still bloody, and he began to scrape at it.

There was a knock on the door.

Jonathan could swear in every language he could pronounce—even if he spoke nothing else in them—and Scarecrow had perfected the art of speeding through every last curse like a Hail Mary, as he was doing now.

Another knock.

He forced himself to be calm, keeping in mind that shouting at the Batman was not going to help matters, and would in fact make them worse. There was a time and a place for passionate anger, and the last thing he needed was any sort of passion. "Yes?"

"Can I come in?"

He considered saying no, if only to see what would happen. As if it mattered. It was the Bat's mansion and the man's prisoner could hardly control his actions. "If you must."

The door opened as Scarecrow tried not to look at him in a way that wouldn't make the not-looking obvious. "Did you want something?"

"Are you all right?"

"Couldn't be better." He was suddenly aware of his hands and they were in no way concealed, with one noticeably bloody. Though maybe it was only noticeable to him. If there was any justice in the world, it would only be noticeable to him.

"What happened to your hands?"

Well, it figured.

* * *

"Are you bleeding?" Every time he turned his back. Every time, there was a new injury, or breakdown, or other complication. Not that things were much better when he was watching, but Bruce liked to think that his track record was somewhat better than that, if only by a hair's breadth. It had gotten to the point where it seemed unavoidable, like an act of nature. Bruce was almost surprised that he was still capable of caring.

And yet at the same time, he _had _to care. Jonathan Crane was a human being, in spite of the monstrous crimes he'd committed. He had humanity, amoral as he was. Bruce had seen it in the kitchen, when the man had shown genuine happiness. It was for the wrong reason, but it was a human emotion. He held the same value as every other Gotham resident, in spite of his transgressions. To deny his worth and leave him to fend for himself—and against himself, from the look of his hands—would go against everything Batman stood for.

Besides, try as he might, he couldn't help but care on a personal level.

"It's nothing." Scarecrow—he could tell the identity from the contemptuous tone of voice after he'd knocked—pulled his hands from his lap and onto the floor, sitting on them.

"It's something." He closed the space between them and sat, with his body between Scarecrow and the exit. "Let me see."

"It's nothing _you _need to be concerned with." He shifted backward and against the nearest wall, wincing as he did so. Whatever damage he'd done to his hands, he was making worse by sitting on top of them. "I can handle it."

Talking to him—to either of them—was like talking with a small child. An extremely articulate and intelligent small child, but one with absolutely no grasp of how the rules applied to him, and not yet able to learn from experience. "I'm not going to try anything. Just let me see, and I'll stop bothering you about it."

Scarecrow glanced from side to side, presumably searching for an exit and finding none. "You'll shut up about it if I let you look?"

"As long as you're not grievously injured."

He glanced around again, held out his hands. "Don't touch me."

"I won't."

His fingers looked as if he'd let a starving animal chew on them, the skin broken time and time again with round, fractured marks that could only be bites. None of the wounds were particularly bloody, but some of them were deep. His nails were almost entirely gone, and the skin around them the most damaged. Scarecrow was almost twitching, again looking like a small child, this one sitting in a doctor's office and horrified at the prospect of a shot. "Are you done?"

"What _happened_?" It was a stupid question. What had happened was obvious; what he was having trouble grasping was _why_ anyone would do that.

"Jonathan bites his nails."

"He almost bit his fingers _off._"

"You're exaggerating." Scarecrow put his hands back on his lap, palms up to hide the worst of the damage. "Anyway, it's your fault."

Considering that the words came from a variation of a hallucination, the words carried more of sting than they should have. He ought to be able to distance himself, but he didn't _want _to. For better or worse, caring for the man had left him personally attached, despite his remorselessness and this hateful…whatever Scarecrow was. On some level, he actually _enjoyed _Jonathan's company, in the times where his bluntness and sarcasm came off as an endearing trait as opposed to a major flaw. "How is this my fault?"

"Because he can't figure out why you're being nice, and he's running himself ragged trying to figure out your motivations." He said it as if it was a statement of fact, and not an accusation.

"Motivations?" Bruce repeated, nearly too confused to be offended. To say that Jonathan had a problem with paranoia would be like calling the ocean damp. Though at this point, it was probably the least of his problems.

"Why you showed him the videos." Scarecrow clarified, standing. "Among…other stuff. Are you done?"

"You need to disinfect that." He got up as well, trying to ignore the way Scarecrow moved several feet to one side just to avoid him.

"It's fine. My mouth, my bacteria."

Bruce resisted the urge to roll his eyes, or call him unreasonable. "If you don't, I'll keep bothering you about it."

Scarecrow stopped in the doorway, turning to glare. "That won't work forever, Batman."

It did, however, still work at the present, which is why they were in the master bathroom within five minutes, Scarecrow wiping at his fingers with a tissue soaked in hydrogen peroxide, and trying to bandage himself one-handed.

"Here, let me—"

He was on the other side of the bathroom faster than Bruce would have thought anyone, psychotic or not, could move. "I can do it myself."

It was absurd, how complicated their interactions were, even as friends. Jonathan was still distrusting, and the voice in his head hateful. Not that Bruce, with his constant exasperation, was faring much better. He was still leagues away from any understanding, and while that was frustrating, it was also upsetting. He couldn't keep himself from caring, even if he wanted to. But that wasn't what he wanted. Against his better judgment, he'd become…well, fond of his captive, and as long as he was going to be in the house, Bruce wanted to help him.

* * *

AN: Jackson Pollock is an artist who splatters paint on canvases.

The id (unrestrained side), superego (rigid, rule-driven side), and ego (middle ground between), are said to make up a person's mind, as proposed by Freud. On a random note, I didn't bother to write the definitions of the three in my psychological notebook when I took psychology, because being the geek I am, I'd recorded them as Superego: Batman, Id: Joker, and Ego: Bruce Wayne.


	62. Information

AN: Sorry about the delay, again. Tuesday night I ended up watching the _Mystery Science Theater 3000 _commentary on _"Manos" The Hands of Fate _with my roommate. Which she didn't enjoy, for some inexplicable reason. And last night, someone pulled the fire alarm in my dorm, leading everyone to be stuck outside for half an hour, being eaten alive by insects. It effectively killed my writing buzz.

In other news, Lily Mae Ray once again made art for this story, which I demand you view here: i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ Shadow-Selves-Scarecrow-by-6Annabel. jpg It's her version of Scarecrow, and it is unadulterated win.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Scarecrow had dropped the bandages for the third time when Bruce put his foot down. "You clearly cannot do that yourself."

He stopped, half-bent over to retrieve the gauze, and straightened, placing his hands behind his back. "Then I'll go without them."

The more they talked, the more Jonathan's "other half" came off less and less like a dark, violent alter ego, and more like a very young, very ill-raised child. "Do you want to get an infection? You saw how well that turned out for the Joker."

"The Joker had debris under his skin from where you slammed his head against cement," Scarecrow countered, back pressed against the wall, pinning his hands. "The cuts only have whatever contaminants were already in my body."

"Not now that you've pushed them against the wall." Bruce picked the wrappings up, though he didn't make a move toward his companion. "If you just let me do it for you, we wouldn't have to keep arguing." He was amazed he'd managed to make any progress with Jonathan at all, considering how dead set this voice was on hating him, even when it was detrimental to their wellbeing.

"That argument isn't going to work twice. As I already said. You probably missed it because you were being vapid."

The insults to his intelligence were becoming something akin to the Joker's threats. When they were coming from someone imprisoned and at his mercy, and he'd heard some variant of them at least a hundred times before, the effect became decidedly less biting. "The argument holds. I'm not leaving this room until your wounds are covered. And since I'm between you and your exit, I guess you aren't either."

His brows raised. "Threats, Batman?"

"No, just honesty."

Scarecrow glanced from Bruce to the door. From his look, he was calculating the distance between them and how fast and unexpectedly he'd have to run before Bruce caught his shoulders and pulled him back it. The tension in his posture lessened as he decided against it. "I believe in exposing injuries to the air."

"Do you realize how many things your hands come in contact with on a daily basis?"

"I'd never have pegged you with mysophobia." He held his hands out before Bruce could ask for clarification, the cockiness draining from his expression like water through a sieve as he did. He jolted as Bruce touched his hands to wrap the bandages, calming almost at once but with a slight shake and a minute shift in posture that signified Scarecrow was no longer in control.

"Does Scarecrow not like to be touched?"

Another jolt. Jonathan looked at him as if Bruce had just admitted to sneaking into the man's house as he slept, and photographing his unconscious body. Or some other followed-without-realizing-it urban legend. "How do you _do _that?"

"It's not that hard. You act differently, and you have separate ways of carrying yourself, even when you're not speaking."

"No one can tell us apart," he protested, fingers recoiling as he cringed.

Bruce slackened his grip on the gauze. "Sorry. Too tight?"

He gave an impatient nod before moving on. "I'm serious. No one can tell us apart, aside from the Joker, and he's clearly evil incarnate, so he doesn't count. Not even the psychiatrists at Arkham could do that, and while none of them were particularly good at what they did, some of them were competent."

"They didn't know." He secured the bandages on one fingers, cut it, and moved to the next. "I didn't know what was going on either, until you told me. I knew _something _was going on, but I wouldn't have guessed what."

Jonathan was avoiding his eyes, face tinged pink. The voice in his head must be a touchy subject. Which would make sense—knowledge of one's own madness had to be upsetting—but from prior behavior, Bruce would have guessed that he saw nothing out of the ordinary of having an alter ego that spoke to him and _through _him, as if Jonathan's vocal cords were some sort of drive-through order box to be used as Scarecrow's leisure. Not that insanity had to make sense.

"Do you always bite your nails?" he asked, to change the subject.

His brows creased in confusion. "Yes. You hadn't noticed?"

"You've never done anything criminal with them. I don't think you've ever clawed at me. And you've certainly never mutilated your hands like this when I was around to see it." He taped the gauze again, started once more. Two down, eight to go. "They weren't high on my list of things to keep in mind about you." Though now that he thought back on it, to the night in Arkham when Jonathan had bitten his face and driven his fingers into the wound, there had been something odd about the sensation. Apart from the overwhelming pain, obviously. "Did you used to put bandages over your nails?"

"Band-Aids." The blush which had slackened in his bewilderment returned, though not as brightly. "The Joker didn't like the biting." He paused, a wry smile gracing his features before continuing, "Ironic, since he was the catalyst for this habit."

The idea of the Joker—who seemed to have had a falling out with toothbrushes and only washed his hair every February twenty-ninth—being disgusted by nail biting was so incongruous that Bruce found himself questioning if Jonathan wasn't having him on. Until he recalled that jokes required a sense of humor, something he'd yet to see Jonathan display.

"You need to find a better way to relieve stress."

"I didn't bleed on anything," Jonathan said, quickly enough for the response to sound reflexive. Bruce didn't like to think of how one would gain the mindset that self-mutilation was an inconvenience and a mess above all else.

He considered pointing out all the things wrong with that statement, but doubted he'd get through. He wasn't sure he could muster the energy for it, anyway. Last night had been exceptionally fruitless. "Are you hungry?"

"What?"

"I haven't had lunch yet. Do you want anything?" He finished the wrapping on the last finger and secured it. "You should eat."

He nodded his assent, silent.

Alfred was gone from the kitchen—either whatever he'd been concocting was for dinner or he'd left the manor in search of ingredients—and lacking the drive to cook, Bruce went for the simplest thing: the fruit bowl sitting on the counter. "Do you want an apple?"

Jonathan, still quiet and still flushed, nodded, and took it, holding the fruit with both hands to compensate for the lack of dexterity the gauze created. Bruce wondered if he'd be able to manage with a fork. That would be the better option, as holding his food was more likely to dirty the bandages—changing them was not something he looked forward to, if Scarecrow was the one in control when he tried—but the fork seemed the more difficult of the two options.

He was so focused on Jonathan's plight that he nearly missed it when the man spoke, almost too softly to be heard. "What?"

"How long are you going to let me stay?" He was avoiding Bruce's eye more than ever, refusing to raise his head. Bruce wasn't sure how he could see with his hair hanging in his face that way, let alone eat.

He found himself at a loss. "I don't know. I…you're not hurting anything here, but…" _Oh, that's a great idea. Tell him that he can stay as long as he wants, why don't you? _Nuisance or not—when Scarecrow wasn't around, he was surprisingly not—his presence was still a wild card Bruce would be better off without, and the man needed to be hospitalized. Lucid as he could act, incidents like this were proof of that. And he wasn't sure how much longer Alfred would tolerate their involuntary houseguest.

But despite all of that, he wanted Jonathan to stay. Part of it was concern—Arkham had never been good at keeping the inmates secure, let alone safe—but there was another part that he couldn't identify. Affection? Relief at having someone else who understood the dual identities, what it felt like to hide from the world? They had more in common than he wanted to admit, to even think about, yet he couldn't help but take comfort in it, though he couldn't say why. Maybe as a gauge of his own sanity. _Sure, I dress up as a bat, but at least I don't think Batman is a separate person._

"I don't know," he repeated, knowing it reflected poorly on him but unable to say anything else. "We'll cross that bridge when we get there, all right?"

Jonathan hardly looked reassured—Bruce couldn't say that he blamed him—but he nodded his assent, taking another bite of the apple. He was still unable to make eye contact for more than a moment, for whatever reason.

"Jonathan?"

"Mmm?"

"I…" Pushing him on this would not be a good idea by any stretch of the term, but he had to at least ask. "Do you remember anything from when the Joker left?"

He looked away, silent, and for a moment Bruce thought he was going to ignore the question. Then he turned back, expression signified that he was thinking about it, not refusing to respond. "Noth—" A shudder. "Everything from that time that I remember…none of that could have really happened."

"Okay."

"You can't find him, can you?" He didn't need to clarify for both of them to know exactly whom he was talking about.

Bruce shook his head. "There's been no sign of him since the news broadcast." He thought of Summer Gleeson, the news anchor whose apartment the Joker had broken into, forcing her to "interview" him so as to give Batman an explanation for his disappearance. The three week absence she'd taken, and how pale and thin she'd looked upon returning, something the cameras and makeup could mask, but not perfectly. The nervousness that was incredibly apparent despite her attempts to hide it. As far as the Joker's victims went, she'd gotten off laughably easy, but that didn't make the experience any less haunting for an innocent woman who'd been ambushed while she slept.

It never would have happened if he hadn't let his guard down, and every day the Joker stayed free was another slap in the face to Summer and all his other victims, and another day for him to torment others.

"Do you know his doctor?"

Jonathan swallowed the latest bite of apple. "What?"

"His doctor." Of course Jonathan wouldn't know what he was talking about. He'd been much too out of it during the news broadcast to listen to the words. "When he escaped, he cracked the bones in both legs. Not enough to keep him from running, but enough to need setting later. He made a hostage tape on the news, showed off the casts. He said a back alley doctor had done it for him."

A back alley doctor that could have some clue to where the Joker had gone after leaving. But Bruce, despite his efforts—some portion of each night was devoted to his search for the Joker, regardless of whatever else he was doing—had been unable to find any illegal practitioners who had repaired the Joker's injuries. The interview had mentioned two sisters, and of the doctors he'd found, none fit those requirements, or knew of any that did.

"Yes," said Jonathan, seizing his attention instantly. "I've met them twice."

"Where?" Bruce could tell by the way Jonathan tensed that he'd asked too forcefully—at least he hadn't growled—but he couldn't dwell on it, mind racing with the possibilities. Jonathan knew, which meant he had a far better shot of stopping the Joker before he could slaughter anyone else in pursuit of his latest goal, "killing" Bruce Wayne. Considering the atrocities the man had committed in his first rampage alone, just to see what Batman would do, he didn't want to think about what sick schemes the madman would employ to rid him of his humanity.

"I—I don't know." He didn't step back, but he did lean his weight that way. "Both times, my glasses were off and I had a head wound."

_Damn it. _And just like that, his hope was lost.

"It was in the Narrows," Jonathan offered, watching him as one would watch a tiger that had slipped out of its cage. "I don't know where, but it was a rundown apartment complex that was beautiful inside. I think the Joker might be their only source of income. He paid them well enough."

Bruce filed the information away, nodded. He didn't bother to ask if Jonathan knew the names, or if he would give them up willing. The man looked much too taken aback by his last question to risk it. He might faint.

"Sorry."

"Don't be." He sat down, hoping it would make him less intimidating. There was a way to go about having a friendship with a captive, and terrifying the friend should not be part of it. "Jonathan?"

"Yes?"

He thought back to Scarecrow's words in the library. _Because he can't figure out why you're being nice, and he's running himself ragged trying to figure out your motivations._ "Listen, when I take you outside and things…it's not because I'm trying to gain something, or to trick you. That's just what friends do. I don't want you to have to panic about it, all right?"

Jonathan glanced at him before once more avoiding his gaze, face reddening as he nodded his head. Bruce couldn't tell if he believed him, or if assenting was just the path of least resistance.

He bite into his own apple and got back to his feet. "Let's go outside."


	63. Necessity

AN: Earlier yesterday morning, midnight, to be precise, the fire alarm went off in my building (yes, twice in two days). There wasn't a fire, but we were stuck outside for a while, and I ended up falling asleep yesterday instead of doing any writing during my drive back home. So yeah.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

It was sunnier outside today and, perhaps for that reason, Jonathan remained in the shade of the back deck. Bruce wondered if he burned easily. He did have freckles, though they were light and easy to miss unless one was up close or looking for them. Avoidance of the sunlight aside, he seemed to be enjoying himself as much as he had during his last excursion, leaning on the rail and surveying the rest of the yard. The flush was gone from his face—as much of it as Bruce could see around the sunglasses, at least—and he was smiling again.

"Do you want to walk around?"

He shook his head, the faint breeze rustling through the hair that extended beyond the brim of his hat. The hat was overlarge on him, though not nearly as badly as Bruce's clothes had been. He tensed, leaned forward, and Bruce moved behind him, expecting him to run, but he only pushed himself up, sitting down on the rail.

"How often did they let you outside, at Arkham?"

For a moment, he thought Jonathan wasn't going to answer, that the question had brought back the shy, awkward mood he'd had in the kitchen. But he did answer, softly, turning his head back as he did. Not enough to face Bruce, but in his direction. "Not often enough."

It wasn't an answer, at least, not in the sense Bruce had been looking for. But at least he was speaking without freaking out. "I thought you didn't enjoy this that much."

"Not when I'm out. In Arkham—" He shivered, though the breeze had stopped. "Anywhere is better than being in that building."

Arkham. The name always brought a sense of regret, sometimes faint, and other times—times like this—sharp. The asylum was one of the parts of Gotham that had never improved, even temporarily. Even when new, far less sadistic management had replaced the man in front of him. Mental institutions were never pleasant places, the state-run ones even less so. And a place like Arkham, dangerous enough that only the desperate or sociopathic would take employment there, was closer to purgatory than a hospital. His work as Batman was to prevent crime, not rehabilitate the criminals, but despite his efforts both as Bruce and his alter ego to police the institution, almost every patient fell through the cracks, criminal or otherwise. "What…happens there?"

"Who does your gardening?"

"What?"

Jonathan bent forward, running a hand over the rose bush. Bruce waited for the bandages to snag, but he pulled his hand back with no interference. "Your flowers. Your yard. It's beautiful."

_Not getting an answer, then. _He wasn't sure why he'd expected one. "Alfred. Well, he upkeeps it. We had it landscaped when we rebuilt the manor."

"Oh." Jonathan pulled his feet up onto the railing, as if suddenly frightened by the thought of damaging Alfred's flowers. Though, in retrospect, it wasn't such an irrational fear. "Doesn't he take care of the entire mansion?"

"Yes."

He couldn't see Jonathan's eyebrows, as the sunglasses came high enough to cover them, but he imagined from his friend's tone that they were raised in confusion. "How does he find the time?"

"To be honest?" Bruce sat beside him, mindful of the roses himself. "I have no idea. For all I know, he's hired a cleaning service that comes in while I'm out."

Something like a smile came over his face. "Wouldn't that show up in your finances?"

"Who do you think taught me how to launder money?" Strange, how it felt to be casually bantering with a man who'd until so recently hated him. Stranger still how it came so easily. "Jonathan?"

"Yes?"

"Did…" He paused, began again. Asking could risk everything, shatter any trust between them. God only knew why, but Jonathan still trusted the Joker, still thought of him as a friend, even after being abandoned. Being abused. Asking for more information on the people who'd treated the man was tantamount to asking him to betray the Joker. "You said the Joker had more than one doctor?"

"No, he—" One bandaged hand flew to his mouth, and he looked away, color draining from the visible part of his face.

"There's only one?" He couldn't back down now, not after he'd asked. The sword of Damocles was hanging over the both of them, and it wasn't going anywhere until Jonathan either answered or refused to speak. "You said "they" before."

"Christ," Jonathan muttered, lowered his hand. "I—look, they're good people, all right?" His other hand moved first in emphasis, and then shakily, as if with confusion or unease.

"I don't want to hurt them." His own hands were up, open. "I'm not going to turn them in. I just want to talk. That's all."

"He broke his legs, you said." Jonathan removed the sunglasses and lowered his own, rubbing his eyes. "He had walking casts. That was the extent of his injuries?"

"All that I could see." Bruce couldn't determine his mood from his tone, unsure of whether Jonathan was coming around or retreating further. "And that's all he mentioned."

"That was _weeks _ago." There was scorn in his tone that Bruce hadn't heard in some time. Not from Jonathan, at least. "At the most, he spent the night with them. He'll be long gone by now."

"I know that." Patient. He had to be patient, even if he didn't get an answer. It was that, or risk provoking Jonathan into becoming as open and inviting as his other half. He could find them without an answer, with any luck. The Joker wasn't an idiot, and he wouldn't allow just anyone to treat his wounds. He'd go to somewhere with talent, and in this city, talent in illegal practices was highly sought. There had to be word of them, and he would find it, one way or another.

Though it would be so much easier if Jonathan would speak. "I'm not expecting to find him."

"He's not stupid enough to tell them where he was going. I doubt he even knew himself." The worry and anger playing out over his features hastened for a moment, an almost wistful look replacing it. "He doesn't make plans. I don't know how he gets along without them, but he doesn't."

"He plans." Bruce hoped he sounded more certain than he felt. It was impossible to know the Joker's mind and he didn't want to, helpful though it could be. "They might be vague plans, and easy to change, but he has them. Do you think those explosives wire themselves?"

"Fine. He plans." He shook his head as he said it, unable to believe it himself. "But he wouldn't have told them."

"As long as there's a chance, I have to take it. Enough people have died at his hands, or suffered." He paused, the words "you're one of them" waiting on his lips. But it was obvious from Jonathan's look that he didn't have to say it. "And every day that goes by with him loose is another day for him to do something terrible. I have to ask them, even if it's fruitless."

Jonathan looked away, and down, mouth working in thought.

_

* * *

_

Don't. Do you honestly believe that he's going to leave them alone?

_I don't know. _Batman had never broken his word—though he'd twisted, just like the Joker—and Jonathan had come to trust him, as much as he could trust the man who'd stolen his life. But the thought of giving him anything on the siblings—not that he had much, not even a last name—still turned his stomach.

_As it should. He's obsessed with stopping crime, isn't he? Do you really think that he's going to let an unlicensed doctor who harbors fugitives go on practicing? Jonathan, you can't be that naïve._

Jonathan thought back, tried to recall if Adrian had ever mentioned other patients. Poor ones, less fortunate. If he was the only doctor that could treat those in need, the Bat might view his lack of a license as the lesser of two evils. Might.

_Or not. And what about the girls? What great service do they provide? I doubt he'll take kindly to the clown's seamstress._

"Would you turn them in?" He hated how his voice sounded, weak and shaking and making it seem as though he'd already given up.

"No." There was no falter in his answer, no shift in expression to suggest that he'd lied. Then again, the Joker had looked similarly earnest when he'd promised Jonathan wouldn't get hurt.

Without thinking about it, he ran his fingers over his sleeve, the part on top of the newest scars.

"I won't have them arrested. Or threaten them, or hurt them in any way," Batman amended, looking honest as ever. "You have my word, all right? All I want is to know if they've got any idea where he went."

"I don't know where they live." He rubbed his temples, trying block out both the Bat and Scarecrow's mutterings, sort through his own racing thoughts. "I told you, I didn't have my glasses, and even if I had, I was losing blood, so it's not as if it's reliable. I can't give you an address."

"I don't need an address." That was true; he was always descending on people when they least expected it, even if they'd taken measures to conceal themselves, like some great spectral wraith. "Just…an apartment layout. A name, anything."

"I haven't got their name," he said irritably, almost too annoyed to be conflicted. He was outside, and it was beautiful. It was a glimpse at the life he could be having—even if ninety percent of his escaped time was spent indoors scribbling in notebooks—and Batman kept ruining it, first by dredging up all those god-awful memories of his stays in Arkham, and now with this.

_It's because he doesn't really care about your wellbeing. It's an act._

How he wished he could make himself believe that. Life would be so much less complicated.

"You never heard their names?"

"Not the last name," he muttered, recoiling as Scarecrow snapped at him for revealing even that much. _Hell._

"_The _last name?" Batman repeated, blinking in revelation. "They're related?"

"No. They're—I don't—he's my friend too." He stared down at the rose bushes, trying to focus on the flowers, make himself shut up, but as much as he looked, he wasn't really seeing anything but the kitchen where Adrian had stitched him back together and the twins had given them cookies. "I can't—"

"I know that you care about him." The Bat looked wounded, somehow, as if he'd glimpsed the Joker's human side as well, and been similarly burned. Perhaps he had. It was hard to believe Batman would be lax enough to let the Joker risk suicide by jumping off balconies.

_Unless suicide was what he wanted._

Jonathan shook his head as though that would clear his confusion, muddled to the point of nausea. He jolted when he felt the Bat grasp his hand—lightly, but palpable through the gauze—blush spreading over his face as before.

"I know that," he said, gently as Jonathan had ever heard him. "But you've seen what he can do. What he did to you. I don't want anyone else to suffer that way. And there has to be some part of you that doesn't want that either."

There wasn't. But there was a part that wanted to help Batman. He didn't know if it was out of trust, or love. All he knew was that he found himself speaking again. "You promise not to turn them in?"

"I promise."

He met the Bat's unwavering eyes, barely hearing Scarecrow's protests. "There's only one doctor, but he has sisters. Twins. One's an artist, and the other's a seamstress. I don't know if either of them do it professionally."

Batman nodded. There was no look of glee or hope on his features, only thoughtfulness. "And their names?"

"Adrian, Anika, and Abigail."


	64. Concessions

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"I'm going to say this," he said, enunciating clearly and slowly, "and I'm only going say it one time." His hand was resting on Abigail's windpipe, not yet squeezing; his other arm, wrapped around her abdomen, held her in place. He could feel her Adam's apple shift as she swallowed, feel the shudders going through her, though she tried to control them.

From the foot of the bed, Adrian watched, face impassive.

"If you get me out of this bed—now—I'll let her go. I want _out. _I don't care if it's on crutches, or in a, uh, wheelchair, or whatever, but if you don't let me up—" And here he did squeeze on her throat, barely, but enough to make her gasp, "then it's not gonna be pretty."

"You wouldn't kill my sister." He did a fairly good job of keeping his voice steady, but "fairly" was still enough to betray his fear. The fact of the matter was, and everyone knew it, that the Joker was about as predictable as spooked horse and while they had services to offer him, any time spent around the Clown Prince of Crime was safe as playing jump rope with a dragon's tail. "We've discussed what would happen if you harmed either of them."

Where was the other one of them, anyway? The Joker hazily recalled her saying something about going out a few hours earlier, and Abigail had screamed when he grabbed her, loud enough to be heard throughout the entire apartment complex, hearing impairments or not. So Anika must still be gone, or she'd have come running to her sister's aid, like Adrian. It still didn't excuse her absence now. Didn't twins share thoughts? She ought to know there was danger, no matter what her proximity, so she could run in and utterly fail to intimidate him, just like her brother.

"Who said anything about killing?" He pulled Abigail closer, and she struggled, both to pull her body free and to nail him in the crotch with her elbow. A valiant effort, but she was around half his body weight, if that, and he barely had to try to overpower her, stroking the hair over her shoulders with the hand on her throat. "Do you like movies about gladiators, 'Gail?"

"I wasn't aware that molestation is one of your skills," Adrian said, his tone entirely dry now. Wonderful. So they thought him incapable of doing naughty things to woman. He was going to have to commit some unspeakable atrocities when he got out, to reclaim his fearsome reputation.

"I've given some thought to, uh, branching out." He realized Abigail was much too close to his injured legs for comfort, and pulled her forward again. She was practically lying on top of him at this point, hair brushing against his face and smearing the makeup. "Are you letting me up, or not?"

"Even if I wanted to, I hardly could with her sitting on top of you." It was a shame Adrian was so attached to his siblings. He did the apathy thing very well, and seemed to mean it for everything but the stuff involving his sisters. With an attitude like that, he could go far in Gotham's underground—or corporate world—if not for the emotional connections holding him back. "Let her up and we'll talk."

"Get my legs out of the stocks, and then I'll let her go." Possibly. He still needed a way out of the bed and back onto the street. He could get his men to retrieve him from there. He hadn't seen them in a number of weeks now, but they knew better than to do anything beyond waiting for his word.

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?" He asked as if it was a matter of certainty, but his eyes left Abigail, if only for a few seconds, taking in rigging that held up his houseguest's legs. "Because that's what will happen if you damage your legs again, before they're fully healed."

"Yeah, and if I make a face, it'll freeze that way. You underestimate the body's adaptability." The Joker tapped his fingers against Abigail's larynx, enjoying the soft thwack sound his gloves made against her skin. "Broken bones heal back stronger, don't they?"

"Thicker, yes. But less flexible. And if they heal back incorrectly, you'd need to break them again it set it right." He reached out, ignoring the way the Joker tightened his hold, and brushed his hand on one of the casts, examining something. "I doubt you'd enjoy that."

Damn him and his medical knowledge. As well as the body's limitations. There were times when he hated his body, even if it was gorgeous, and this was one of them. "I'm not staying here for another few weeks. I'll snap, and that won't be pretty for anybody. Least of all your family."

He tightened his hold again, and Abigail made a gagging sound.

Adrian raised his hand, in what would have been a pleading gesture had he not covered it up by rubbing his eyes. "Look. It's possible—and by possible I mean that I don't recommend it at all and I think you'd have to be an idiot to go for it—"

"Without the commentary, doc."

A sigh. "It's _possible _that I could get you out of this in a week, but with the added stress it's going to put on your bones, the chance of re-injuring yourself is enormous, considering your life style choices."

"You're commentating again." He loosened his hand, though he did pull the strands of hair wrapped around it. Abigail swung her hand to hit him again, feet shuffling on the carpet. He let her hand colliding into his ribs, enjoying the sting that went through him. She could hit decently when properly motivated. "Can you reinforce the casts?"

"I'd have to, knowing you." Adrian tugged on the collar of his shirt, looking older than he actually was. "But you'd still have to give your body a rest. Either not moving at all, or using a wheelchair—"

"What about crutches?"

He winced. "I wouldn't risk it."

"But it's possible?"

"Anything's possible."

The Joker thought of several things that were _not _possible, but refrained from listing them. "Is it plausible?"

"It would be excruciating." Adrian seemed to realize that the Joker would enjoy that, and shook his head. "If you were incredibly careful about it and didn't do it for an extended period? Yes. But if any of these go wrong, you could end up back in traction, or with metal pins going into your bones."

The Joker sucked on his scars, considering his luck, and decided that he liked those odds. "Fine." He gave one last, vicious squeeze to Abigail's throat, incapacitating her for a moment later when he let go. Rather than kicking or hitting, she slid to the floor, gasping for air, as he'd anticipated. From the sound of it, she'd landed on the plate of whatever dinner she'd been trying to bring him before he'd grabbed her. Meatloaf, he thought, but he hadn't looked for long enough to be sure.

"Son of a bitch!" The words were ragged and broken, coming out between gasps.

"You do realize that we could have had that conversation civilly, don't you? You didn't have to grab her."

"Really?" The Joker twisted his body to watch Abigail on the floor, massaging her throat as the color returned to her face. It was the second time she'd gotten close enough for him to strangle. "Oh well." It had been a lesson to her, at least, about getting too close to dangerous men, and one she should have learned before.

From somewhere outside of the bedroom, a door opened. "I'm back. Where is everybody?"

"In here," Adrian said flatly, as Abigail pulled herself to her feet. Her knees were scratched and faintly bloody from the plate she'd fallen on, and her color had returned, the skin around her throat already purpling.

Anika appeared in the doorway, surveying the situation with raised brows. "What happened?"

"Nothing," Abigail said, before either of the men could speak. "Jackie's just an ass."

"Ah." She still looked concerned, but nodded. "So what else is new?"

"Anika," said the Joker, sitting up as much as he could, "you are a failure of a twin."

She only smiled, with a small salute.

* * *

"Do you do this every night?"

Bruce tensed, stepping away from the piano and surveying his surroundings. Jonathan sat up, now visible over the back of the couch that faced away from the instrument. How long he'd been sitting there, Bruce had no idea. He'd wandered off after they'd come back inside, and considering the severity of the discussion and the information he'd revealed, Bruce had decided it best to give him space. Jonathan hadn't resurfaced during the dinner hour and he hadn't felt compelled to search for him, instead going about his own business until the sun began to fade and he made his way to the study.

"Do what?" he managed, once he'd relaxed. Jonathan had to have been there before he'd come in, which didn't stop him from berating himself for not noticing the man's presence.

"Go out there." Jonathan waved one hand toward the door. "Outside. As Batman."

"As often as I can, weather permitting." He braced himself for a lecture in the vein of Alfred, about overworking himself and how he was pushing for an early grave. Jonathan had been a doctor, after all, and still thought of himself as one, though his license had been revoked.

But aside from a raised brow, Jonathan had no outward reaction. "Don't you get hurt?"

He couldn't tell if that was asked in concern, or by a thought process along the lines of "maybe, if I hurt him somehow, he won't go out and my friends will be safe." The second one was entirely implausible—they both knew that without the toxin, Jonathan had to rely on trickery, and Bruce had learned to be wary of such things—but he wasn't sure how much sympathy Jonathan felt for Batman, or if he even viewed them as the same person. He thought of his own alter ego as a separate person, after all.

"Yes. But I'll still go out if it's not serious."

"That sounds like a good way to die." He didn't sound hopeful about it, so there was that, at least. Bruce wasn't sure where they stood, after the last conversation. He needed to do something, another sign of trust.

"So I've been told." He bit his lip, considered. "Do you want to see it?"

"See what?"

"The cave." He beckoned a hand, already questioning the stupidity of such an offer. _Invite him to where you keep all the weapons, and it's dark and slippery. That's wise._

Jonathan stared, moving ever so slowly backward, catching himself just before he fell off the cushions.

"I'm not going to lock you up down there again." He _hoped _that had been Jonathan's thought process, because if it wasn't, that was the last thing he needed to put in the man's mind. "But you've seen everything in the mansion by now, haven't you?"

"I doubt I could see everything in this place if I spent a _year _here," Jonathan muttered, but he got up, crossing the space between the couch and the piano. Bruce took his hand, too cautious to allow him to wander unsupervised, and hit the keys that opened the door, in rapid succession. He hoped Jonathan hadn't caught them, and glanced to his friend to find that Jonathan's gaze wasn't on the piano at all, but on their entwined hands.

"It's slick down here," Bruce warned as they stepped into the elevator, Jonathan standing close beside him. He wondered if the man was afraid of heights, and felt a moment's concern before remembering that it was dark in the cave, almost dark enough to shield the descent.

Jonathan was silent when they stepped out of the elevator, either taking things in without comment, or waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting provided. Bruce lead him further out to where the light was brighter, only now wondering how he was going to change and still keep an eye on Jonathan.

"That's where you kept us?"

Bruce turned, found Jonathan pointing to the cells. "Yes."

"And how did you have those constructed without arousing suspicion?" His tone was analytical, as though he was discussing the décor of someone's kitchen over tea instead of looking at a place where he'd been imprisoned. Bruce couldn't be sure if the nonchalance was forced, or the result of so many prior incarcerations.

"By paying very, very well, and getting workers who aren't native speakers," he answered honestly. He still wasn't sure what Alfred had bribed them with—or if he'd used other methods of persuasion—but the butler had assured him there would be no risk, and he'd taken Alfred's word, as always. Besides, it kept him from having to install plumbing in the cave.

Jonathan nodded with a trace of a smile, though his eyes were already elsewhere, surveying his surroundings and leaving no detail unexamined. It was a dark, wet place, full of bats—albeit sleeping—and equipment, half-hidden in the shadows. He imagined it would be a nightmare for many, which served to explain Jonathan's widening smile.

Bruce led him to the armor cabinet, pulling out the plates of armor. He wondered if asking for Jonathan to look away would work. He didn't want to have to restrain him unless it proved absolutely necessary. It would hardly be a gesture of trust.

He realized Jonathan had asked something, and straightened. "What?"

"How do you get the Batmobile out of the cave?" he repeated, pointing at the vehicle. He'd sat upon the stone table by the cabinet at some point, swinging his legs gently back and forth. The bandages on his hands were dry, at least.

"It's not a Batmobile." He forced his tone to stay level. There were times when his determination and the danger of the situation weren't enough to keep things serious, when he realized exactly how ridiculous jumping at people in a bat costume was, from an objective standpoint. And he didn't need reminders of it by belittling the name of his equipment. "It's called a Tumbler. And it's a bridging vehicle, it jumps from one point to another. So I can jump the gap between the floor in here and the ground outside—"

"Then why is it called a Tumbler, if it jumps?" Jonathan wrinkled his nose in apparent distaste. "Batmobile works better, as a title."

"Well, that's not what it's called." He gritted his teeth. "Look that way, would you?"

Jonathan averted his eyes without question. It was still the most uncomfortable experience of suiting up he'd ever had, and that was counting the old, painful armor. "Can you take the elevator back up on your own?"

"Can I just stay here?"

To say that he had not been expecting that was akin to saying that grass was green. "What?"

"I'd rather just stay here," Jonathan said, swinging his legs faster. "I like caves."

"Don't you hate water?" He regretted asking the second he'd done it. There was a pause, a long one, and he thought Jonathan wasn't going to answer at all. He couldn't say that he blamed him.

"Caves are…different," Jonathan said finally, slowly. "I like the dripping. It's meditative, in a way. And I've seen everything upstairs."

Bruce did not point out that Jonathan himself had said otherwise, less than twenty minutes ago. He considered it, though everything about it screamed "unsafe." Jonathan didn't have any weapons—he couldn't have any weapons—which meant that with the weapon cabinet locked, he'd have no way to open it. And the GPS was waterproof, so it wasn't as if he could get anywhere even if he did make it through the waterfall. But still—

"Please."

Against all common sense, he consented, sliding the cowl on. "I'll explain it to Alfred. Don't try anything." He took what he needed, and locked the cabinet, making sure the keys stayed with him.

"I won't."

"Promise."

He did.

"You don't have to look away anymore."

Poor choice of words, as Jonathan's immediate reaction was to turn toward him. His eyes more than doubled in size when he saw the Batsuit, and he nearly fell off the table.

"It's all right." He didn't use the Bat voice, though he always tried to while in disguise, to keep from slipping out of it. "It's still me."

Jonathan nodded, though he didn't look any less horrified.

Bruce held in a sigh, decided that anything else he tried would be equally unhelpful. "It's all right," he repeated, stepping toward the Tumbler. "I'll see you when I get back."

* * *

AN: The line "Do you like movies about gladiators?" comes from the film _Airplane!_.

Stocks are those restrain devices that go around legs, the hinged wooden boards that lock around a person's ankles and keep them in place.

And yes, I know that twins don't share thoughts. I watched _Shoes r_ecently (look up the full version on Youtube if you haven't seen it) and I couldn't resist.


	65. Mistake

AN: You may be wondering where I've been for the past three days. I was writing an essay. Somehow, _somehow _college managed to make writing a paper on the word "fuck" boring. Soul-suckingly so. That, and studying for Latin. A note to anybody thinking about studying a foreign language: _study _it over breaks away from school. I used to be very good at Latin, and then I didn't look at it over Christmas break, or the summer. And now it is horrible. Also, this chapter just really did not want to be written, and I wanted to do it justice instead of forcing it.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

There was a thrill to his nightlife, much as he denied it out loud.

That wasn't to say that being Batman wasn't dangerous, or exhausting. Or outright depressing, once he looked past the few people he managed to help and saw the bigger picture, the mob and the madmen and all the other crimes, the ones that didn't make the headlines because they weren't extravagant or bizarre. Just sad, as every murder or embezzlement or assault was, though the media tended to forget that. Not that he could blame them completely, what with a man in a Batsuit running around. He helped the city, as much as he could, but the very fact that they needed help like him was a sign of how deep the troubles ran.

There were some times when depressing hardly covered it.

But despite all of that, there was a part of him that he would never admit to anyone—that he tried to keep hidden even in himself, as his serious side found it deeply shameful and disgusting—that enjoyed it. Because how could he _not _enjoy jumping off of buildings and flying over the city instead of crashing and dying horribly? And it wasn't just laughing in the face of gravity. There was a _rush _to it all, the stealth, the elation at discovering a scheme before it was unleashed and putting an end to it. There was no thrill to the fights themselves—though beating someone senseless sometimes felt much more cathartic than it should have—but the adrenaline afterward was something else entirely.

There were parts of this job that were undeniably cool.

Breaking into fabric stores in the dead of night and looking for any signs of an Abigail in their sales records, however, was not one of them.

Aside from the fact breaking and entering wasn't all that elegant—especially when the security system consisted of one video camera pointed toward the registers—it was hard to remember that he was protecting the city in a place where the biggest threat was running his hand through a sewing machine—they were all off—or tripping onto a pair of fabric scissors. Which wasn't a concern at all, unless the blades just happened to go between the plates of armor. Any dignity the situation could have had disappeared around the second store he'd checked. This was the fifth, and every bit as unhelpful as all the previous four had been.

Which wasn't surprising. If she had any brains at all—and anyone who had managed to stay in the Joker's good graces for so long had to be smart, or insane—then she would pay in cash, and she certainly wouldn't give a name. Or if she did, she'd use a false one. Actually, she probably ordered fabric off of the Internet with a credit card—under a pseudonym, of course—and either had it delivered to a post office box or dropped off at a neutral location.

Technology was every bit as hindering to him as it was helpful.

He kept on anyway, refusing to be swayed by the hopelessness of the situation. Fruitless, as the last four searches had been. It was, however, the first stop to gain his attention—in the form of muffled screaming, overheard as he was on the way out.

_

* * *

_

What are you doing?

Scarecrow ignored the question, moving along the sides of the cave, taking care to avoid the patches of ground slick—slicker, considering that this was a cave—from the water. The light was dim here, and even with Jonathan's glasses, he still had to squint, feeling the rock as he searched. Some part of his mind—his intellectual side, comprised of the tangents Jonathan had gone off on that actually stuck—reminded him that the oils on human hands could kill growing cave formations. He couldn't bring himself to care.

They needed a way out.

_Scarecrow?_

_Give me a minute. _His hand brushed against something, cylindrical and long, and he instinctively pulled back, thinking of snakes. But there was no hiss and no movement, from what he could see, so he took a moment to compose himself and reached out again. No, not a snake, a root. It was hard to feel, under all the bandages, but he could see tiny fibers spreading out, and it was flexible.

_Jackpot._ He realized, directly after the moment of hubris, that he was counting his chickens before they hatched and, with his karma, it would come back to haunt him. Wonderful.

_What are you planning? _Concern and annoyance, in his other half's voice. The concern, he could understand. The annoyance made him want to shout, and, more than anything else, even the Bat-lust, cemented the need for escape.

_Our way out. _He wrapped both hands around the root, as tightly as he could through the bandages. The lacerations beneath rubbed across the gauze, and burned. Scarecrow closed his eyes, took another steadying breath. They were near the water, but judging from their proximity to the elevator, they were almost beneath the manor. And roots—especially those that could go through rock—were _strong._ Much too strong for him to break off with his bare hands.

But there was a chance that whatever he was holding had once been attached to something close to Wayne Manor, close enough to have caught fire itself. And a root with its source burnt to the ground couldn't be as strong. It could be rotting itself; in the dark, he couldn't be sure. At least, that was his hope. And it was about time that luck took their side for once, pride or not.

He could feel Jonathan in the back of his mind, nervous, full of questions that he wasn't asking. He considering reassuring his alter ego, but that would take mental energy that could be spent on the task at hand. _I know what I'm doing, _he said, noting the harshness of his tone, but not until after he'd said it.

Jonathan nodded.

He braced one foot against the wall, tried tightening his hands again—he couldn't tell if the moisture he felt in the bandages came from the water in the cave or the cuts reopening—and pulled, with everything he had.

Less than three seconds later, he collided with the floor, hard, root still in his grasp.

It had been rotting, then.

_And we might well be concussed now. Wonderful plan you've got going._

_Shut up. _God, it was going to be excruciating to stand up, wasn't it? He put one hand down to brace himself, and pushed into a sitting position. Yes. Yes, it was.

_Care to explain how the decaying remains of the original landscaping are going to get us out of here? It's not as if you can break a GPS with it. Or bludgeon someone._

He decided against taking the effort to stand—being on all fours would be safer anyway—and made his way across the cave, to the point where the water was widest, right in front of the waterfall. Scarecrow moved as close to the edge as he dared, holding the root in one hand.

_Are you expecting that to work as a floatation device? _There was worry beneath Jonathan's sarcasm, worry bordering on panic. Scarecrow couldn't blame him, given their inability to swim, the slippery rock, and the torture Jonathan's grandmother had put him through in the name of salvation. They ought to poison a church when they got out of here. After all this suffering, it would be therapeutic.

_No. I'm testing the depth._ He closed his free hand on an outcropping of the cave floor, as tightly as it would go. They couldn't swim, not if their lives depended on it. They couldn't even tread water. But they could walk across it, if their feet touched, and the current wasn't too strong. He extended his arm as far as he could, pushed the root through the surface of the water.

_But the waterfall—_

_Weren't you the one who said, "better to have tried and failed"?_

Silence. The current wasn't as strong as he'd expected, though there was resistance. It would get much worse by the fall, he knew, but here, it wasn't so bad. If he could get into the water, maybe he could wait in the point that was safe and—what? Wait for the noise of the approaching Batmobile and try to dive through underneath it when it parted the fall? He'd either be crushed by the vehicle or drowned by the current outside, if the hypothermia didn't get him first.

Still, he had to try _something._

The root didn't reach the bottom. He stretched until it burned, until he was leaning so far that his hand was barely on the rock, and the root at the tips of the fingers on the opposite hand, until Jonathan was shouting at him that they were going to fall in and he had to move back, the root slipping from his hand. So that was out. _Hell._

Scarecrow racked his mind for the options they had left, and drew a blank.

* * *

Screaming. Distorted by something—most likely, a hand over the mouth—but definitely screaming. He'd come to recognize the sound well during his time since returning to Gotham, as well as the intent behind it. It wasn't a scream of laughter, or anger, but fear. And it didn't take long to spot the source.

Because both the source and the cause were out in plain sight. On the sidewalk, less than ten yards away from the fabric store he was currently on the roof of. Directly past the alley he'd hidden the Tumbler in, having driven it over in stealth mode and concealed it behind the dumpster. The source was a woman. He couldn't make out her features clearly, both because of the hand covering her mouth and the way she was struggling, but he could make out the cause. Or, in this case, causes.

Specifically, the two men trying to force her into the car parked beside them.

He had no idea what had brought this about—a kidnapping, a "friendly" encounter that had become much too friendly, an argument that had gotten far, far out of hand—but the catalyst was hardly important. There was nothing that could justify grabbing someone against her will and forcing her into a vehicle—and even if there was such a circumstance, he highly doubted it applied here—and he wasn't going to let that pass.

He ran to the edge of the roof, jumped onto the ledge, and surveyed the scene before jumped, noting their positions, the car and the garbage bags stacked against the dumpster that could serve as obstacles, whether or not they were armed—none that he could see, but safest to assume they were—and spread his arms, preparing to dive.

The woman swung her legs out, kicking the man in front of her. Bruce was unsure of whether she'd hit his stomach or his crotch, but either way he doubled over, as she swung her head back and collided with the face of the man holding her arms, pulling herself free as he recoiled in pain. She ran, screaming as she did, and for a second it seemed that she would make it, until one of the men—the one she'd hit with the back of her head, now sporting a bloody nose—recovered enough to sprint after her, grabbing her in a choke hold and covering her mouth once again. The other got up as she was dragged back, reached into his pocket. There was a blade gleaming in his hand when it reemerged, one that he waved in her face.

Having seen enough, Bruce jumped, spreading the cloak to slow the descent. The seconds of plummeting before the glide filled him with the same sensation as always, a mix between exhilaration and terror. Then he caught the air currents and flew, twisting in midair at the last moment so his feet would hit the ground. He could have landed on the closer man, but he wasn't about to risk it when he had the blade so close to his victim, landing directly behind him instead. The impact reverberated through his legs, painfully, but not so much that it inhibited him.

The man turned while he was still kneeling, faster than Bruce had anticipated, the knife in his hand arching with the turn. He shot up, grabbing him as he did, and threw him at full force into the nearest wall, turning back to regard the other attacker. The one he'd thrown, as he knew from experience, would either be unconscious or incapacitated, and as such, not important at the moment. They stared at him, the woman's expression a mix of hope and fear, and the man's pure terror. Rather than trying to fight, he shoved the woman at Bruce, and turned to run. He caught her, up-righted her and moved her to the side. "Call 911." He had no idea if she had a phone or not, but that could also be dealt with later.

The batarang he threw hit the back of the knee, and the man went down instantaneously, body curling in pain as he screamed. He strode to him, examined the wound. It hadn't hit deep enough to do serious damage, but it had done the job. Bruce shoved his fingers against a pressure point on the neck, one he'd known even before the League of Shadows had trained him, knocking him out. He pulled a plastic cuff tie from the utility belt, bound his hands, and began to drag him toward the alley. _Take them to the station, and the police will take care of her—_

She grabbed his arm as he passed, and he stopped, turned. Her other hand held a cell phone, but she'd yet to dial, shaking, with tears streaming down her face. She looked as though she couldn't decide whether to be frightened or thankful. "I—I t-thought they were g-going—"

"It's all right." He lessened the growl in his voice, gently moving his arm free. "The police will get you home safely."

"You—you saved—" She stopped again, but this time it wasn't a stutter, her eyes widening as he heard plastic crinkling behind him, and whirled—

Feeling a sudden surge of pain as he did.

_Don't let your guard down. _It was one of the first lessons he'd been taught by Ra's Al Ghul, early and often. And for good reason, as his very life depended on it. He'd made the mistake of underestimating an opponent before, or overlooking a vital detail, as he had now. Bruce had thrown the first man harder than usual, the act of standing while he threw adding extra heft. And that added force had made him miss the wall entirely, throwing the man against the dumpster. Or, more specifically, the garbage bags against the dumpster.

Cushioning the blow, and keeping him conscious. And uninjured, or at least functioning enough to retaliate.

He'd overlooked it. It wasn't the first time he'd missed something, made things harder for himself through a momentary lack of insight. Each time he learned, avoiding making the mistake a second time. This was nothing new.

But it was the first time he'd ended up with a blade that managed to land between the plates of armors, sliding into the space between his ribs.

He reacted on impulse, jerking away. His attacker pulled the knife out—the pain as he did was blinding—and swung again. But the first blow had been luck, and Bruce, running purely on adrenaline, dodged the second, and grabbed him, slamming his head against the wall, knocking him out for certain. Time snapped back to normal as he did—before it had seemed somehow delayed—and the pain returned, doubling him over. He brought his hands to his side, trying to cover it, seeing blood on the armor that he couldn't feel through the gloves. The woman was dialing, and kneeling as she did, her eyes meeting his, frantically asking if he was all right, but he didn't have time to answer, couldn't let her call the authorities and have him hospitalized. He staggered to his feet, and shoved past her, trying to run to the Tumbler but only able to manage a shuffling walk, pulling himself to safety before she could interfere.

His vision swam as the top closed over him, fumbling for the first aid kit inside as he pried the armor loose, nauseated by the bleeding below. He brought the engine to life, set it on autopilot for home, and began packing gauze onto the wound as the Tumbler accelerated, the force shoving him against the seat, praying this would be within Alfred's ability to repair.

And also praying that he made it that long.

* * *

Jonathan reclined on the stone table, staring up at the stalactites. He could hear the bats, but in the dim light, they were hard to make out. Such an impractical place for a lair, so overly dramatic. So Batman.

_Jonathan._

_Yes? _There was a hard edge to Scarecrow's tone, one that never signaled anything good.

_You do _want _to get out of here, don't you?_

_How can you even ask that? Do you think I enjoy being locked up?_ He shook his head, lowering his glasses on his nose to rub his eyes. _You know how I feel about Batman. But that doesn't make me a willing captive. And I feel god-awful enough about this as it is, all right?_

_Relax, Jonathan. _Scarecrow placed his hands on Jonathan's shoulders, firmly but without causing pain. _I know you're conflicted. I'm not angry. I just want to leave._

_So do I._ He said it too harshly, sighing loudly as he did. _But—_

_I know. Because he's being nice._

_I can't tell if it's an act or not. _He felt pinned by these damn emotions, crushing the life from him like stones in a press yard. What he wouldn't give to be just like the Joker, if only for a day, unrecognizing of and unhampered by his feelings.

_It's not. But being nice doesn't make him a good person. Everyone has their redeeming qualities._

Jonathan nodded, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. Good and evil weren't clear cut things. Someone could be truly horrible and do wonderful things, and vice versa. And yet, despite it all, he got the sense that Batman _was _good, aside from his line of work. And it was driving him mad.

There was a roar of an engine, audible even over the waterfall, and a sudden light through the water. The Batmobile came bursting through suddenly, terrifyingly, landing with an impact that seemed to shake the cave. It came to a halt on the floor, lights still on, the top sliding open.

Batman didn't come out.

A full minute past. Jonathan felt a surge of dread—remembering their "What happens if you die?" conversation all too well—and approached the Tumbler. "Batman?"

Nothing.

"Batman?" He waited, walked to the driver's side of the Batmobile, and gasped.

The blood was the first thing to catch his notice; not surprising, given how much of it there was. It soaked through the bandaging Batman held to his side, and onto the armor, where it seemed almost black. Batman's skin was paler than it should have been, eyes half-closed.

"Oh my God."

"…Alfred..."

Jonathan, who'd already hauled himself into the seat to apply pressure, paused mid-panic. "What?"

Batman managed to extend his arm, pointing toward a button on the console. "Call Alfred…push…"

He slammed it full-force, watching it light up. "You idiot! Why didn't you push it yourself?" True, blood loss lead to forgetfulness, but that wasn't an excuse. He could die. _Die. _Jonathan couldn't wrap his mind around it. Even when he'd fantasized about killing Batman, he'd never really seen him as dead. _You're supposed to be indestructible, _he thought feverishly, putting force on the bandaging to help stem the flow. Batman couldn't leave him, couldn't take the easy way out and leave Jonathan forever conflicted. And lonely. _You can't die. _"You can't. You have to be okay." He felt a rush of something he couldn't identify, and found himself leaning forward, pressing his lips against the Bat's.

His cheek brushed the mask as he did, and the shock it released threw him back against the dashboard.


	66. After the Fact

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The shock from the mask felt almost identical to the one from Rachel Dawes's taser. Jonathan had heard it said that the sensation of pain wasn't something the mind could remember after the fact, only fabricate, but lying against the dashboard, spasming from the current, the part of him that could think at all thought that this was exactly how horrible it had felt. Well, not exactly. When Rachel Dawes had electrocuted him, the mask had caught the full force before it transferred through, sparking and burning. Here, the electricity made direct contact with his skin.

He wasn't sure which was worse and lacked the mental capacity to decide, what with the current still running through him.

Jonathan didn't know how long he lay there, aware that Batman was bleeding out beside him, but unable to control his body to help him. The effects of a taser were supposed to stop two or three minutes after they were triggered, and a taser was the closest approximation to this shock that he had. And if hadn't been two minutes by now, then this was the second longest two minutes of his life, tying with the last time he'd been electrocuted and dragged around Gotham on horseback, screaming.

Neither managed to be worse than being held underwater, though.

When the convulsions ended, he managed to force himself up and found that he was still shaking, pain radiating through his body. It was the worst along his cheekbone, where he'd touched the mask, and he could tell without raising a hand to it that the skin there was burned, but there wasn't a part of him that didn't ache, as if afflicted with an electrically-charged flu. It occurred to him that his heart would have been weakened by his starvation in February, and applying currents to a bad heart was asking for death. One would think that someone as prepared as the Bat would have considered that sort of thing.

Well, at least if this sent him into cardiac arrest, life would become so much less stressful.

Jonathan wallowed in self-pity for perhaps another second, before the memory of the situation at hand jolted him back to reality. "Batman!"

Batman didn't respond, eyes three quarters shut. Where his skin was visible, it was pale. Not white, but much lighter than it should be. His hands were pressed against the bandaging held to his side, but not firmly. He was losing consciousness. Jonathan leaned forward after a second of hesitation—_the armor can't be electrified, I've been sitting on it, it must just be the mask—_and pushed on the gauze, hard. The Bat grunted in pain, but remained otherwise motionless. Jonathan had no way of gauging how much blood he'd lost. He could be in need of a transfusion. And the blood loss didn't take into account the wound itself—something vital could have been hit. He'd have to examine the wound itself to know its depth, and he couldn't afford to take the pressure off to look.

_It could kill him._

Scarecrow said nothing, watching from the shadows at the back of their mind. His emotions were closed off, leaving Jonathan unable to sense whether he agreed with this course of action, or whether he wanted his counterpart to let Batman bleed out. With Scarecrow, it could go either way. He hated Batman with every fiber of their being—aside from the parts that felt lust—but he'd realized by now that staying out of Arkham was advantageous, and that was where they'd go if the Bat died.

Jonathan couldn't let him die.

It wasn't a question of if. It didn't even feel like a choice. He was simply _unable _to let the man cop out and die before Jonathan could work out what the hell he was feeling for him, before he could decide if this was love or an offshoot of Stockholm Syndrome. It was bad enough that Batman had that nerve-grating habit of disappearing for the night whenever he'd made Jonathan especially conflicted; dying now would be the ultimate disappearance, and leave his captive forever lonely and bewildered. He refused to allow it.

"If you die," he began, without intending to speak, "I swear to God that I'll…" And trailed off, at a loss for anything to say. What? He couldn't kill him, not if he was already deceased. Reveal his secret after the fact? There was no threat there. Beat his corpse to a rotting pulp? Not even remotely believable as a threat. Damn it. His mind was short-circuiting along with his body.

"Don't die."

He couldn't believe he'd let that statement out of his mouth. How disgustingly…sentimental. What happened to hiding his emotions? True, that had become pretty much impossible after the kissing/electric shock incident, but there was no reason to add to that by acting like a love struck teenager. If there was a God, then the Bat would pull through and forget all of this in the process. Then again, if there was a God, Jonathan's mere existence seemed to warrant his wrath.

There seemed to be less blood now, but he couldn't raise the bandaging to ensure that it had stopped completely, much as he couldn't treat the injury alone. "Where the hell is your butler, anyway?"

"Right here."

He froze, a chill going through his body—aside from the burn on his face, which stung in spite of his terror—and managed to turn his head. The butler stood there, first aid kit in hand, his expression unreadable. Jonathan imagined he'd be worried for the Bat's safety—though now that he thought of it, he'd never seen the man show concern—but whatever he was feeling, it was too understated for Jonathan to read. It was at times like this that he wondered how he made it as a psychiatrist.

The butler's eyes tracked back and forth, taking in the situation. Jonathan could only imagine how it looked, what with him sitting on Batman's lap while he was unconscious, with the Batsuit pried half off and Jonathan's face burnt. And of course the butler would know about the electrified mask. The fact that the butler's disgust became prominent enough for Jonathan to note only cemented it. "I…uh…"

"I don't want to know," he said, thrusting the kit at Jonathan. "Get up."

Considering the circumstances—and taking into account whom he was talking to—Jonathan thought it best to put his dignity aside and comply. He thought—or imagined he did, at least—that there was also worry in the man's voice, and that perhaps the harshness of his tone had come from fear for Batman's safety as opposed to anger or hatred. So he kept silent out of respect, mind burning with questions about his captor's condition that he refused to let pass his lips.

The process of treating the injury was a long and arduous one, its duration made all the tenser and more extended by the fact that Jonathan's sole job in it was to hold the first aid kit and hand the butler things when he asked for them. It didn't help that the man had moved into the passenger side of the Batmobile when Jonathan pulled himself out, blocking the wound from sight so that Jonathan couldn't even monitor his progress. He wondered if that was intentional, though a part of him was fairly certain that the butler wasn't seeing him at all, focused only on his charge's safety.

He realized that he was still shaking, and he couldn't tell if it was from electricity or worry, anymore. It was a miracle he didn't drop the things he was handing over—and he became vaguely aware through his panic that they were increasingly good things, such as a needle and surgical thread—or that he hadn't passed out from how tightly he'd locked his legs, to stay upright. His throat felt parched, palms sweating despite the chill of the cave air, and he felt a split second away from fainting when—

"There." The butler handed back the medical tape, which he took wordlessly. "I've done all I can."

"Is he going to be all right?" He cringed, even as the words were leaving his lips, but he couldn't keep from asking.

He looked Jonathan in the eye for the first time since he'd come down, expression softening for reasons his conscious companion couldn't fathom. "Yes, Dr. Crane. As far as I can tell, he'll be fine."

* * *

"Anika," Abigail muttered, in the middle state between sleep and waking, trying to pull her way back to unconsciousness while aware that she was awakening against her efforts. "Turn off your goddamn alarm."

There was no answer, of course. Because she would have taken the hearing aids out to sleep. It made no sense, having an alarm when she could hardly hear it to wake her up, leaving her twin to take care of it every. Single. Morning. Senseless. Groggily, Abigail sat up, hugging her blankets to her body—it was impossible to get to sleep without the fan on, but it always made the morning so _cold_—and covered her ears, wrenching her eyes shut. Christ, this alarm. It sounded like _pounding_, really, instead of the electronic beep she'd come to hate.

Maybe Jackie had concussed her when he'd thrown her on the floor. She hadn't had a concussion in years now, but the headaches had pounded like this, from what she remembered. _That's just what I need. Adrian wanting to cut into my skull to relieve pressure. _"Anika!"

The shout got through, with Anika bolting up as if from a nightmare, scuffling at the nightstand by her bed for the hearing aids. Over her sister's panic and that god-awful alarm, she thought she heard footsteps. Had she shouted loudly enough to wake Adrian up down the hall, or had the sound been going for that long?

"What?" Anika slipped the second aid into place, switched it on. "What's wr—what's that noise?"

"Your alarm, you insensiti—" The words died on her lips as Abigail's mind cleared the haze of sleep completely, and she realized all too well that it _wasn't _an alarm they were hearing, but a ramming. Like someone trying to break down a door.

"Is that a break-in?" Anika's face was barely visible, just catching the glow of the nightlight, but Abigail could tell without looking that she'd gone pale. She was deathly afraid of intruders since the night the toxin was released and one of its victims had gotten in and beat her half-deaf, the only thing Abigail had ever seen her afraid of. It made no sense as a fear, considering how much worse their father's "games"—Dodge the Beer Bottles and Leave The Kid Who Had a Bedwetting Accident Stuck in a Dark Empty Washing Machine For Hours on End being two of his favorites—had been growing up, and how much more frequent, with nightmares of those never plaguing her. But then, fears didn't have to be rational, did they?

Abigail felt fear of her own, of an entirely different nature. "Jackie couldn't have gotten up, could he?"

Footsteps again, coming closer and closer to the door. Abigail leapt from her bed and ran to her sister's, putting on arm around her and lifting the blankets to hide beneath them when the door opened, her brother silhouetted in the frame. "Adrian?"

"Someone's knocking at the door. And they're not leaving."

Abigail felt a whole new worry; more fear than she'd felt in months. In a city like Gotham, unexpected callers were never good, least of all for those who ran illegal operations and housed terrorists. "Who?"

"No idea. One of you open it. The other serves as back up."

"What about you?" Anika asked, her usual speaking tone seeming too loud, suddenly, even with the pounding drowning it out.

He held up a syringe, presumably full of a sedative. "I'm making sure Jackie doesn't reveal himself by being overly vocal."

And to think that stronger men would faint at the thought of coming near the Clown Prince of Crime with a needle. Her family was fantastic. Hopefully, they'd make it through the night. Abigail nodded, untangled herself from her twin, and got out of bed, taking her Mace from the dresser and hiding it in her sleeve. "I'll get the door. You get the gun."

Anika nodded, brushed past Adrian, and ran down the hall toward his room.

_At least I can say my life is never boring._ They were all about to be killed, potentially, or arrested, or face Jackie's wrath when the drugs wore off. And yet all she could think about was how much she wanted to get back in bed, or at least have a decent cup of coffee.

She slid the Mace into her hand as she moved down the hall, wondering if it would seem too threatening, should a cop be there, for her to hold it out when she opened the door. In Gotham, they really couldn't penalize her for that. Especially considering that she was old enough to possess it legally.

Abigail did lift the can up, but kept it towards her shoulder, turned inward, careful to keep her finger off the trigger. A simple matter of flipping her wrist, should the need arise. She took a breath in, assumed a subtle defensive stance, and opened the door.

There was a woman there, crying, her face almost as red as her hair from the tears streaming down her cheeks. She'd been raising her hand to pound the door again, nearly hitting Abigail's other shoulder. "Oh God! I'm s—sorry! Please, I need a phone! There's been an a-accident, and I don't know if he's all right—"

"I need your phone" was a common excuse to get into the house and brought the novel _A Clockwork Orange _into Abigail's mind at once, but this woman couldn't overpower her, especially not when they were armed, and her tears seemed genuine. Besides, if someone was injured, there could be a business opportunity.

She stepped back at once, holding the door. "Relax. You can come in." She could only imagine how she looked, hair tousled and in Rudolph pajamas in August, holding a can of Mace. Anika appeared in the hallway, one hand hidden in her robe, hiding the gun, and from behind their unexpected houseguest, Abigail shook her head "no."

"She needs the phone," she said, by way of explanation, eyes dropping down to the woman's hands, the sides bloody from beating at the door. "And a first aid kit." She hoped she sounded sympathetic, instead of annoyed at the rude awakening.

"No, please, I don't have time—"

"It's fine. Get the phone," she added to her sister, with "hide the firearm before she calls the cops" implied. "You said someone else was hurt?" She led the woman to the living room, sat her on the couch.

"Yes, but he ran, and I've been trying to call for help but my phone hasn't had service for the past two blocks, and no one would open the d-door—"

"Well, somebody did. It's all right." There were bruises forming on the woman's neck, much like the ones Jackie had left on her own throat, and she was glad that she hadn't removed the makeup hiding them before she went to bed. Overly aggressive boyfriend maybe? That had been hurt…lover's spat out of hand, perhaps. The police shouldn't be a problem if they waited for them outside… "My sister will be right back with the phone. It'll be okay."

"Thank you." She took a breath, visibly composed herself, and reached into her handbag, pulling out a memo book. Dumbfounded, Abigail watched as she began scribbling in it, still sniffling in her sobs.

"Think nothing of it," she said, arching an eyebrow. Anika returned, phone in hand, and handed it over wordlessly, with only a "You're welcome," to the woman's "Thank you." They watched in silence as she dialed 911, pressed the phone to her ear.

"Operator? I've just been assaulted and there's a—" A pause. "Yes, I'm safe now." And another. "Vicki. Vicki Vale."


	67. Reporter and Revelation

AN: Public service announcement from your resident zombie geek: If you can handle gore (and there's less of it then I thought there would be) go see _Zombieland _now. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Get thee to at theater. Yeah. Because of my busy schedule, I don't have time to play Humans vs. Zombies this semester, so I'm getting out all my geekiness in promoting this film.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

There was no pain, as long as he remained motionless.

The sensation Bruce felt more than anything else was fatigue, his body struggling against itself to remain unconscious, even as he opened his eyes. He was dimly aware that he'd been waking for a while now, but never more than a minute at a time, sleep clouding over him whenever he tried moving and found it painful. Or, on a few of the occasions, before he could even try.

He'd never been sedated, but he imagined this was how it felt: thoughts slowed by exhaustion, body refusing to respond to the sluggish signals the mind sent. Considering how badly the average Arkham patient was sedated at any given moment, Bruce couldn't say he blamed them for breaking out as they did. A thought which went completely against his moral convictions, but he was too drained to remember exactly what those were. He lay back on his bed—he assumed it was his, and a bed; it was soft, there were blankets over him, and that was all he was capable of taking in right now—using what limited brain power he had to try and coax his body into disregarding the hunger nagging at him.

It didn't work, of course. Such was the life he led.

He gave up, opened his eyes. Maybe he could move this time, without hurting himself, just far enough to get to the kitchen. He'd be content sleeping on the linoleum floor, as long as it meant sleep again. He couldn't care less about his comfort, not when he was so clouded by fatigue. He managed to turn his eyes toward the door, and felt them widen, though only just, when he realized that Alfred was seated beside the bed, watching him.

"Alfred?" Incredible, how draining that was to say.

Something came over the man's face, what would have been joy on someone less stoic but that looked more like only the absence of worry on Alfred's. "Master Wayne. You need to eat."

"What—" He tried to sit up, pain shooting through his torso as he did, and the "what happened" that he'd been about to ask raced back into his mind. The woman being threatened, and the fight that ensued, and the _knife. _He felt his heart race at the memory, flashing back to the blood and pain, the way he'd tried to press his hands over the wound to apply pressure. But the armor had obscured it, and by the time he'd managed to pry it off in the Tumbler, his vision was already riddled with dark spots and he could hardly stay conscious—

"You're all right." Alfred's hand was on his shoulder, warm, comforting, and pushing him back down. "Don't try to get up, sir. It's a bloody miracle something vital wasn't punctured. Give yourself time."

"How long have I been out?" Talking seemed to take less effort, the more he did it. Or maybe anything was bearable in comparison to the pain. For a nonlethal strike, it sure hurt like hell. He was never going to hear the end of this from Alfred, not that he had any right to complain. Keeping the opponent in sight was one of the first lessons he'd learned, and to lose sight of that was like forgetting the first letter of the alphabet. Idiotic, and amateur. It was only by sheer dumb luck that it hadn't cost him his life.

"Two days." His voice and face stayed placid, with only the briefest flash in his eyes to showcase the tortured worry he must have gone through in that time. "You kept just enough blood to avoid needing a transfusion. And don't even think about going out again until the stitches are out, Master Wayne." It was a talent, how much Alfred could make a grown man feel like a disobedient school boy.

"I won't." The reluctance in his tone was clear to both of them, and he was already beginning to forget his hunger, mind racing with thoughts about the woman he'd saved, and if she'd gotten to safety. The fate of the men he'd left behind, the fact that the Joker was still loose, and everything else that had been burdening his life as of late. Why was it that injuries came off as added complications instead of serious risks to his life?

"I recognize that look, sir." He knew Alfred well enough to realize what he must be feeling; relief, anger, fear, and concern, all at once. But he kept his tone light, though Bruce couldn't tell whose benefit it was for. Perhaps the both of them. "Your distressed damsel is fine, so don't panic yourself over tracking her down."

He allowed himself a modicum of solace before realizing the full implications of the other's words and staring in confusion. "How did you know there was a woman?" He vaguely recalled returning back to the cave before things got dark, and Jonathan's presence, but he'd been in no condition to recount the story, and he hadn't thought to contact Alfred before he became incoherent. Did he talk in his sleep? Bruce thought back to all the board meetings he'd slept through and felt anxiety blossoming beside the pain.

"She made her presence known." Alfred lifted a newspaper from the nightstand, and held it in front of Bruce's face. He anticipated having to look for a side article, but there it was, emblazoned across the front page: BATMAN: MORTALLY WOUNDED?

"This made the headline?" He was unable to read the article itself, still too tired to focus on the print, especially when it was being held a foot away from him. The only clear things were the title and one of the few, grainy shots anyone had ever managed to take of him, reused in nearly every report of his presence. Rarely, however, did reports of his night to night activities make the headlines of anything besides a tabloid, even those claiming injury. After all, there was no proof. "How did—"

"Ms. Vale happens to be a reporter," Alfred explained, placing the paper in Bruce's hand. Now if only he could lift his arm without risking agony. "She's employed by _The Gotham Gazette, _but your near-death experience placed her on the front page of the _Times._"

_Vale._ Why did that name sound familiar? He braced himself, drew the paper closer—not nearly as painful as he'd expected—and scanned the byline. Vicki Vale. He'd heard it somewhere before, that much he was sure of. "Is she well-known?"

"She is _now._ She's fairly new to Gotham, though she does have a few high society connections. You may have seen her at a party or two."

_Vicki Vale. _Now that he thought of it, he _had _seen her at least once, at a party a month or so ago. She'd been with Veronica Vreeland, who'd said Vicki was interviewing her about her charity—a wise decision on Vicki's part, whether intentional or not, because it gave her friendly ties with the upper class. He hadn't paid much attention then, as it was only a day or so after the Joker and Jonathan Crane had gotten into the mansion itself, which had dominated his focus for the better part of a week. And now, as he discovered by scanning the article, she wanted to repay Batman, or at least rest assured that he was alive.

So now he had the entire city on lookout, and a reporter searching for him. Wonderful.

"Did she say _what _she was doing alone on the streets at night?" he asked, letting the newspaper drop onto the bedspread. Alfred picked it up and sat it back on the nightstand, straightening it out before he answered.

"Taking photos for a story on organized crime, I believe. She did a television interview last night, but I don't if the camera was damaged or not when she was discovered."

Bruce pondered, for a few seconds, who would have conducted the interview, as Summer Gleeson and Mike Engel were still hesitant toward interviews regarding Batman—too close to the Joker for comfort—before trying and failing to shake his head in disgust. How could smart people—and Vicki, from what little he remembered of her, had been intelligent—be so amazingly stupid? "She was risking her life for a photograph?"

"Yes, and the camera _was _broken, now that I think of it. I imagine she thought the photos could prove guilt, and help achieve a conviction." Alfred shrugged, straightening the cuff of his sleeve.

"Unbelievable." Stopping crime in Gotham was necessary to prevent the city from tearing itself apart, but she could have been killed. Would have been, or at least severely beaten, if he hadn't happened to be nearby. "What was she thinking?"

Alfred's eyes had the faintest glimmer. "Perhaps that she'd show the people of Gotham that their city doesn't belong to the criminals and the corrupt?"

Of all the parental tricks in his arsenal, using Bruce's words against him had to be the worst. "They're not comparable—she hasn't trained to—she could have been killed!"

He didn't need to respond in words, speaking with only a very pointed look and a glance to Bruce's bandaged midsection.

"That's not the same as—"

"It is, sir, and there's no way around it. So her decisions and yours were equally idiotic." He gave a small smile that didn't quite reach his eyes—still the only part of his face betraying his worry—and turned toward the door. "I'm getting you something to eat, Master Wayne. You need it."

The more awake their conversation made him, the more he became aware of the hunger clawing at his insides like an animal caught in a cage, so he didn't argue. Though he was unable to keep from wincing at the thought of how sitting up to eat would feel. He would have to be wounded on the abdomen, were all the bending and movement occurred. That was just how things went for him.

And now the whole city knew about the injury. God only knew what the mob would make of it, or the other Arkham inmates. Or the Joker, wherever he was hiding. How would this affect the clown's plans? Or anyone's plans? With Batman dead or critically injured, criminals could become much more bold, and reckless. And he had a determined, equally reckless woman on his heels now. Thinking back on it, she'd mentioned Batman when they'd first met, the one bit of their conversation he'd truly heard. What had she called him? Fascinating? No, intriguing. And part of the reason she'd moved to Gotham to begin with.

_Hell._

He heard Alfred's voice outside the door, and stopped contemplating the effects of Vicki Vale's hero worship to listen. "For the love of—just go in." A moment's silence, and then Alfred reappeared in the doorway, dragging Jonathan Crane by the scruff of the neck, or, more literally, the collar of his shirt.

"Alfred?"

"You traumatized your house pet," he said, pushing Jonathan into the room. The man was blushing furiously, head lowered to the carpet, and refusing to make eye contact with either of his companions. "I'd be much obliged if you convinced him to stop hovering around like a kitten in desperate need of having its ears scratched by the time I get back." And then he was gone, leaving Bruce and Jonathan in what would have been the most awkward moment ever, had half of their previous interactions not gone just like this.

"I'm all right," he said, certain he looked far from all right, lying in bed starved and fatigued. He could only imagine what he'd looked like when Jonathan came across him, half-stripped of armor, half-conscious, and fully covered in blood. And that was without factoring in the emotional mindfuck that must have accompanied the visual.

Jonathan nodded, and sat in the chair Alfred had occupied, head still down. He was angling himself away from Bruce, steadfastly refusing to look up. Bruce couldn't even gauge how it must have felt, knowing that the man's hallucinations told him Batman was evil, and having the perfect opportunity to end his life. He was, after all, the one who had damaged Jonathan's mind beyond repair, revealed him for what he was and put an end to his prosperity.

Jonathan Crane had every right to hate him, and was certainly right in being as conflicted as he was about where they stood in this shaky friendship.

And yet, he'd still helped him, despite all of that. Bruce's recollections of that time were hazy at a best, but he recalled telling Jonathan to signal Alfred. And he remembered pressure—had Jonathan applied it to the wound? He must have, because Bruce had been in no state to do it himself, and Alfred wouldn't have gotten there in time, considering how rapidly he was bleeding.

He had saved his life, and in more ways than one. "Thank you."

His strange friend went redder than Bruce would have thought possible, and brought a hand up to the side of his face opposite the bed. Bruce assumed it was a nervous tic, a movement to brush back his hair, but he kept it in place, clamped tightly against his skin. His face…why did Bruce remember something about his face? There had been something, he knew it, but he couldn't bring to mind _what._

Jonathan had climbed into the Tumbler with him, that much he was clear on. He clung to the memory like a lifeline, trying to piece the rest of the event back together from the main branch. He had shouted, face going white, and pressed the signal, applied pressure…what else? Bruce had been losing consciousness then, and the memories were barely there. Jonathan had leaned over him at one point, and he remembered a jolt, a strange, burnt smell, and the other leaning, almost falling back against the dash…the mask. Had the mask shocked Jonathan? But there were no burns visible on the hand he could see.

He coughed, loudly and falsely. Jonathan jerked, hand flying down as he turned toward Bruce, raising his head. That hand, Bruce noted also lacked burns, and he was going to chalk the memory off as a dream when—_his face._

There was a wound on Jonathan's cheekbone, the skin around it raised and shiny, an unmistakable burn. Jonathan caught him looking and jerked his head back down at once, blood draining from his face, but Bruce had already seen, and there was no denying it. _But how?_

Why would his face have touched the mask? He hadn't sat beside Bruce and let his head lean too far—Bruce had no memories of Jonathan anywhere but on him, pushing at the injury. He had leaned forward, but no, to get that close, he'd have to—

Kiss him.

No. It was ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous, stupid beyond powers of speech to describe it. Jonathan Crane couldn't—wouldn't—not ever—but he had hugged Bruce, and held hands, and—still. It was a far cry from a kiss, and the voice in his head would never allow it, not that he'd ever want to, but ludicrous and laughable as it was, it was the only explanation for the burn's location that made any sense. Jonathan Crane had kissed him. _Jonathan Crane _had _kissed him._

_Fuck._


	68. Deciphering

AN: Sorry for the delay; school has been particularly busy lately—five page papers don't sound like much until you realize they're five pages _single-spaced_—and I've been drained of the energy/motivation to write. Also, my computer has decided that he hates me. Yes, I assign inanimate objects gender. I hope the one shot I published tided everyone over a bit.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Something was going on.

Contrary to what the average slack-jawed layman might think, clowns were not stupid. At least, not this one. For all the news reports that called him psychotic and irrational, there were few people beyond the Batman that acknowledged him as brilliant. Morally repugnant by their silly little standards, yes, but genius nonetheless. The only people with that much insight out of a world of billions who _ought_ to be in awe of his every move—besides his Bat and his men—that he could think of offhand were Harley, Jonathan, a couple of the brighter Arkham psychiatrists—and for them, brighter meant a three watt bulb—and his current caretakers.

At least, usually.

Now, they were trying to hide something from him, and the act was about as transparent as a pane of recently Windex-ed glass. It had been mildly amusing, watching them tiptoe around him for the first few hours when this charade had started, and speculating what they were trying to hide, how long it would take them to break down and beg him not to hurt them for it, whatever "it" was. Only they hadn't done that. Which the Joker took as a sign that they _actually _believed they were fooling him.

And calling him stupid was right up there on his list of "Ways to Get Your Intestines Pulled Out and Used as Rope to Hogtie You While I Crush All the Bones in Your Hands and Feet and Make You Eat Ground Glass," second only to calling him crazy. In other—and ironic—words, very, very stupid.

True, Adrian wasn't _that _bad at it. Mostly, he just stayed out of the room, and didn't do much talking while he was in there, which might have worked if the Joker wasn't such an excellent judge of character. Not to mention the fact that he distinctly remembered waking up either last night or earlier this morning to find the man shoving a syringe into his leg, before everything went black again.

He was not a fan of involuntary sedation—at least, not on his end—and for that, he might just snap the doctor's neck.

Abigail was the second best at it, since she'd started acting colder toward him after the chokings and the masturbation and the MP3 player theft and all that jazz. Not that it had stopped her from manicuring his nails or trying to get him to exfoliate—because constant makeup use clogs pores, or some such crap—or all the crazy ideas she thought up with her sister when she was bored, but she came into the room less, and had stopped bothering him on her own, for the most part. So in theory, her silence wouldn't be off-putting.

But in practice, she made herself unbelievably obvious, by casting all these nervous little sideways glances at his bed when she would have ignored him before, stammering out words instead of staying silent. If Adrian was about as transparent as a sheet of wax paper, Abigail was flat-out plastic wrap.

But both of them were better than Anika, whose attempts at deception were more see –through than _the air itself._

The simple fact of the matter was that she could not leave him alone. _Ever. _The Joker wasn't sure if she was a product of her environment, or if it was just his wildly attracting personality and hypnotic good looks, but she never seemed to get angry at him, no matter what he said or did, even when he hurt her family. She and her twin—when Abigail was talking to him—were like the sisters in the fairy tale _Snow White and Rose Red, _when their mother let a bear into the house. Someone with common sense would stay away from a wild animal, even if he was just lying there and letting himself dry off by the fire, whereas the girls' reaction was to jump on the bear, pull his fur, and roll him around on the floor, among other things. Anika was like that, never noticing or caring about the danger she tempted. He could be holding a knife in her mouth and she'd still be talking around it.

So when she stopped speaking altogether, it was like waving a banner that read "I've Got a Secret: Guess What."

He _despised _being underestimated. Much as he despised Anika's taste in music.

That was her method of ignoring him; to walk around in headphones cranked up so loud that they threatened to remove what was left of her hearing, singing loudly. The "if I can't see you, you can't see me" theory taken to a higher, more idiotic level. It didn't help that she was even more tone-deaf than she was legitimately deaf, and that her music collection seemed to be composed of nothing but theme songs from eighties and nineties cartoon shows.

As she was doing now, while she "searched" the room for the remote. It had been missing when he woke up, and it couldn't be clearer that they'd taken it away to keep him from watching the TV. Which made whatever they were trying to hide all the more intriguing. They weren't stupid enough to betray him, so what else could have happened that would merit a news broadcast?

"Anika."

She was rummaging around under the bed, which was the first plausible spot she'd looked for the "lost" remote. The entire "you must have misplaced it" façade would have worked better had she not started the search in places completely out of his reach, such as the other side of the apartment. There was only singing in response. "I will travel across the land, searching far and wide, each Po—"

"_Anika_." Considering that she was half-deaf, with the volume of her music and the volume of her voice, it was entirely possible that she really couldn't hear him. Highly likely, even. Not that he cared. The Joker leaned as far toward the side of the bed as he could, watching her as he lifted his plate and spilled every bit of food left on it onto the bed sheet. He wasn't sure if it would offend Abigail, since the sheets were clearly old, and fairly plain. Though the hems were decorated with somewhat clumsy embroidery, as if they'd been a first project.

"It's you and me, you know it's my destiny—"

He took his glass—which, sadly, he'd finished drinking before he'd gotten the idea; there was nothing like a nice dark stain on the carpet as a reminder—and dropped it off the edge of the bed. It didn't shatter as he'd been hoping, but it did roll towards her, brushing against her leg, and she scooted backwards, pulling herself out from under the bed. He waited until her head was emerging, until he could just see the start of her hairline, to throw the plate.

This one did shatter.

The glass fell from her hands, which moved up instinctively, either to cover the cuts the shards of pottery had made, or to swipe at her eyes. He wasn't sure if he'd damaged those, and he didn't care. She'd adjusted to half-deaf, so she could adjust to half-blind eventually. Whatever the damage, her head tilted forward, and he grabbed her by the hair, knocking off those damn headphones as he dragged her onto the bed. "_What aren't you telling me?_" He shouted it, and loudly, right into her ear so there would be no confusion.

That, and to terrify her. Two birds with one stone.

But Anika, because nothing could ever go right for him, only screamed, and either her cries or his were loud enough to summon Abigail and Adrian to the doorway. And the latter, of course, was carrying a sedative. _Life, _he reflected before he passed out, lingering on the edge of consciousness just long enough to see that he hadn't blinded her after all, _is incredibly unfair._

* * *

"I—" Jonathan muttered, voice just barely audible. He stood, still staring down, and still white as salt. Bruce wanted to say something reassuring, to calm him down or at least keep from obliterating the progress they'd made in communication, but he was speechless. It wasn't that he couldn't make his voice work, but that he couldn't form the words in his mind at all, let alone send the signals to his voice box.

"I'm…I…I'm go—" He stopped talking, his own mind apparently suffering the same disconnect as Bruce's, turned and fled, through the door before Bruce could sit up, let alone call out.

"Jonathan!" It was the only word he could force out, too little and too late. The part of his mind that wanted to get up, even though it would be excruciating, and find Jonathan to ensure that he was all right, was completely overshadowed by the other ninety-five percent of his mind that was only capable of repeating "What the fuck?" over and over, as if that would somehow make things clearer.

It was one thing when his female adversaries tried to kiss him. They'd never been successful, and he'd always recognized that for what it was; either an attempt to distract him, or, on Pamela Isley's part, to kill him. He could even understand it—much as it disgusted him—when the _Joker _had kissed him: it was either to shock and confuse, or out of madness. Those circumstances, he could wrap his mind around. This…this he had no response for.

Hell, he still wasn't sure how to define his relationship with Jonathan Crane in the first place.

They were friends, that much he'd figured out. It was inappropriate and dangerous and more than a bit offensive to his moral standards, but somewhere along the line he'd begun to care for the man, and that wasn't something that he could turn off, though it would make things that much easier. Still, the fact that he'd grown fond of the man didn't bode well at all.

Sympathy for the devil.

_He's not that bad. _He realized he was arguing with himself, and one convincing auditory hallucination away from having a "Batman" in the same way that Jonathan had a "Scarecrow," but at this point, that seemed to be the least of his worries. _I don't condone what he's done. Not at all. But…_

But when someone's hobby involved poisoning and torturing others without remorse, it wasn't something that he could just ignore. True, he didn't have to like every aspect of a person or that person's behavior to be on friendly terms, but this wasn't something like a different religious belief or opposing political alignment.

Jonathan's pastimes went far, far beyond that line.

_He hasn't done that in so long. _Not that it worked as an argument, considering that the only reason he hadn't was because he'd been contained, first at Arkham and then at the manor. But with all the other thoughts racing through his mind, it was the best he could come up with. Beyond that, the issue was no longer what Bruce thought of their relationship, but what _Jonathan _did.

And considering that Jonathan had kissed him, it was a given that Jonathan obviously regarded it on different terms.

He closed his eyes, trying to cancel out both the pain in his side and his racing thoughts. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax, don't jump to conclusions. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax, don't jump to—_Jump to conclusions?! He kissed me! _His eyes opened, measured breathing stopped. Yet another thing the League of Shadows had not prepared him to deal with. _He's unstable. He's still hearing voices—well, a voice—even when he's medicated. I can't take this at face value. It could mean anything._

Anything. "Jonathan Crane is madly in love with me" being a part of that anything.

That was ridiculous. Jonathan had been clingy because he was insecure, not because he was affectionate, and until very recently, he had hated Bruce with all of his heart. Part of him—a very vocal part, when it emerged—still did. Bruce was treating him like a human being, but considering all the bad blood between them, that wasn't nearly enough to overcome his deep-seated dislike.

_Except that he hated the Joker before he fell for him, and even after all that happened between him, they're still friends._

And when he thought of it, that was Jonathan's personality. Proud, yes, hostile and demanding of praise, but codependent. He'd never functioned alone, first backed by the League of Shadows, then the mob, and after that, acting as a lackey for the Joker, with or without Harleen Quinzel. For all his arrogance and assumed superiority, he needed someone, as protection, funding, or just a companion.

_So I've become a replacement Joker. Christ._

There was a sound from the doorway, and he raised his head, apprehension writhing in the pit of his stomach. Bruce was simultaneously relieved and disappointed to find Alfred entering the room, carrying a bowl of soup, disgusted with himself for both reactions and at a loss for how he was going to cope with this, let alone interact with Jonathan again.

* * *

AN: Yes, Anika is singing the theme song to _Pokémon_. Don't judge me; I grew up in the nineties and I used to watch it every day. If I went to anime conventions, I would totally dress as a member of Team Rocket and carry around a Meowth doll.


	69. Buried Inside

AN: Today I got back to my dorm after class and found a flyer by the doors, supposedly from the Center for Disease Control, telling us to cover our mouths when we coughed, wash our hands when we sneezed, and go directly to a hospital if _bitten_. I love Humans vs. Zombies week, and very much regret that I can't play this semester.

In other news, one of my friends has taken to assigning people countries based on their personalities, after an anime she's fond of, and I am Belgium. So hooray for waffles, I suppose.

_

* * *

_

Jonathan.

Scarecrow, sitting on the guest bed his other half had fled to, attempted to untangle his hair from around his fingers. It wasn't a task that sounded difficult on paper, but considering that the gauze wrapped around his hands clung to things as if it was duct tape, it was easier said than done. Especially when Jonathan was all but screaming in his mind._You need to relax before your heart gives out. _He said it for hyperbole, but honestly, considering what their body had gone through in the past year, it wasn't unlikely.

_Relax? _he repeated, and even mentally, his voice was strangled, tense. _How do you expect me to relax?!_

It was a shame that slapping him wouldn't help in the least. Likely to make it worse, actually. Though it was still so tempting. _Control your breathing. Or count backwards. Or…_ Scarecrow thought back to their sessions with Joan, combing his memories for anything she'd said on calming down. He'd never realized just how much he zoned out during those sessions until now. _Or…find a happy place? _Okay, so _Fight Club _wasn't therapy, but it could work.

He could imagine Jonathan's happy place, through his own worry. It would be in some beautiful, snowy area, probably on a mountaintop in Austria or something ridiculous, in a cabin with a warm stone fire place, full of books, chemicals, and Fair Isle sweaters. His own would be somewhere more wooded, more feral, and his idea of a good time would be either scaring the shit out of people or jumping the Batman's bones.

There was a moment's pause in which he reflected on what he'd just said, grateful that Jonathan was too distracted by his own panic to have picked up on that. It was one thing to have that sort of thought during a…one-handed moment, but in their present circumstances, it was entirely uncalled for, not to mention disturbing.

He wondered how Jonathan would react to the knowledge that he'd found the sensation of kissing the Bat coupled with the sensation of electric shock to be rather appealing, once the worst of the pain faded, and decided to keep that information to himself.

_Scarecrow?_

_Yeah? _Jonathan was a hyperventilated breath away from unconsciousness, but his voice was somewhat steadier, at least. Which was probably for the best; if he didn't send himself into cardiac arrest from all the freaking out, he would likely develop ulcers. And while that might get them sent back to Arkham, or another hospital, it would be miserable in the long run.

_Do you think he knows? _Scarecrow couldn't tell from the tone if his other half was hopeful or disappointed, and that turned his stomach. _I mean, he'd lost so much blood. What if he was just staring because he was shocked that I'd been burned?_

_It was a fake cough, _he countered, gently as he could. Life would be much simpler if Jonathan believed that his feelings were secret, but he couldn't go around as blithely as he had before now that the Batman knew. There was too much of a risk of slipping again, as he had in the Batcave. He had to acknowledge the truth, and keep it in mind, even if it was harmful.

_That still doesn't mean—_

_Jonathan._ He physically raised his hand to his mouth, to strengthen the gesture beyond the their connection. _Do you really think that he'd stare that way because his mask burned you? He _designed _it to do that. How much of a surprise could it have been?_

He felt the panic growing again, though not as rapidly as it had before. _What am I supposed to do?_

_Don't kiss him anymore, for starters._

It was harsher than he'd intended, though it needed to be said, and he felt Jonathan shrink from the words. _I'm sorry._

_It's—_Well, it was as far from all right as the Earth was from the sun, but a white lie was the best he could offer in such circumstances—_okay. I know you didn't ask for this. Neither of us did. But we can't afford to slip up again. This…this he could write off as worry, or insanity, or something. But do it again, and we won't be that lucky. _If they were that lucky _this _time, he did not add.

_And if he already knows?_

He felt the shiver go through his other half, and though he couldn't tell if it was from relief or regret, he placed his arms around him in a hug, as tightly as he could without having his own physical body. _He's got no proof. You saw how much blood he lost, how unresponsive he was when you kissed him. The only way he could be sure that it happened at all was your reaction._

_But he's intuitive._

Once again, Jonathan's voice was ambiguous, neutral to the emotions beneath it, and more than anything, he wanted to shake him, hit him, demand to know what he was thinking on the other side of their conspicuously closed link. He could _not _want this. It would destroy them, humiliate them, and either immediately crush Jonathan when the Batman rebuffed that emotion, or go the way of the Joker, with a few wonderful moments ending in unimaginable pain.

He'd let his desire override his common sense once before, with the Joker, and that was a mistake he'd never make again, even with the remnants of lust that persisted to this day.

_No, he's a detective. He's smart, but he doesn't get everything straight off, does he? He was stupid enough to get poisoned by you. Twice. He knows that you kissed him, and that's it. He isn't going to jump to conclusions on what that means._

_But—_

He hugged again, moving himself as closely as he could. They fit perfectly against each other, as they were meant to. _Listen to me, Jonathan._

Silence, and then a nod. Just one movement, and faint, but it was the first voluntary motion Jonathan had made since he calmed down enough to speak.

_He doesn't know. I promise you that he doesn't know. This isn't a crime, and that's what he's good at putting together. I mean, look how long it took him to figure out the difference between us. Or that you hate water. _He felt Jonathan shudder in his arms, and ran a hand over his back, resisting the urge to smile, somewhat disgusted with himself for using that example. He knew better than anyone what water meant to Jonathan, and it was wrong to bring it up, even to prove a point, but he had to view it as the lesser of two evils.

Jonathan _couldn't_ trust the Batman. Not after everything the man had put him through. It would be idiotic; something someone with even half of his alter ego's intelligence would be too smart for. But there was more to Jonathan than intellect, as he knew, being closer to him than anyone else. For all his skill in seeing the faults of others, he kept a blind idea towards his own neuroses. He needed love, and after years of having that need rejected by his abusive great-grandmother, his mother, his high school crush, and everyone else he'd ever encountered, that need was almost obsessive. It wasn't a problem, because they were perfect, incapable of having faults, but there were people like the Joker who saw that need and exploited, perverted it.

People like the Batman. The man was a sadist, no matter how he was treating them now. He could not have damaged Jonathan to such an extent—and withheld the antidote when he did—if he wasn't evil inside. His approach was different from the Joker's, to be sure, but two opposite sides were still a part of one coin. He probably believed that he was acting in Gotham's best interests. That didn't make him right, and that didn't make him any less likely to tear Jonathan apart if given the chance.

Scarecrow refused to let him have that chance, desire to fuck him unconscious aside. He could keep himself unattached, keeping from feeling a thing beyond the physical, but that wasn't what Jonathan felt. He believed, despite all he'd been through, that somewhere, there would be someone who cared for him and loved unconditionally; a white knight who would charge in on horseback and carry him away from the evils of the world. Knowing Jonathan, it wouldn't even have to be romantic, as long as there was any love, any real concern.

A naïve hope, but a beautiful one. And one almost realized, because Scarecrow _did _love him unconditionally, and would do anything in the world to make him happy, anything to keep him safe. That was his reason for living, and why he'd been born to begin with. But he couldn't exist independently of his other half, having no physical form of his own, and as long as he had no presence outside of Jonathan, he couldn't be everything needed to fill that demand. He would always fall short, and Jonathan would always be longing.

There were moments like these when that thought tore at his soul, eyes stinging and body aching with the full force of the fact. Hopeless, he knew, but even with that knowledge, he couldn't give up. Maybe he'd never fulfill Jonathan's search for another, but he would search with him, let him know when he'd found the right person. And keep him from the wrong ones, as he should have done with the Joker. But he hadn't, and the suffering had almost killed them both.

He wouldn't make that mistake again, no matter what the Batman sparked inside him.

_He doesn't understand people, _Scarecrow whispered, brushing Jonathan's hair out of his eyes. _Especially not someone as complex as you. How could he?_

Another nod. Jonathan hugged back, hard, but he remained silent. Their mental and emotional links were still closed, and while Scarecrow was only slightly better at interpreting gestures, this one felt like a hug for reassurance rather than agreement. He held in his own worries, freed one hand to brush Jonathan's hair away again, and kissed his forehead. _Jonathan?_

_Yes?_

His stomach clenched from worry, the logical part of him warning not to ask. To do so now, when Jonathan was still panicked from the revelation that the Bat knew about the kiss, immediately after Scarecrow had calmed him as much as he could, was asking to push him too far. It was like digging into a wound to clean it out before the bleeding had stopped. But even knowing that, he had to push ahead. It was asking for infection to leave a wound dirty until it congealed, and it was asking for trouble to keep himself in the dark on Jonathan's feelings, not knowing how he felt about the Batman until his other half blurted something out, or worse. _Do you l—I mean, I know that you have feelings for him. But do you want—do you hope that he returns those feelings?_

Jonathan shifted backward. Only a bit, less than an inch, but enough for Scarecrow to sense the movement. For anyone else, it would have been insignificant. A nervous tic, or a worry that the answer would provoke a shouted, angry response. But for Scarecrow, it was the furthest thing from trival. It wasn't a tic; it was a leftover from childhood, when Jonathan's great-grandmother would either strike him or hit him with her cane when she was angry. The fact that he'd evoked the same response, unconscious reaction or not, made bile rise in his throat. Made him hate himself.

He pulled Jonathan closer, an arm across the back of his shoulders to keep him from pulling away. _It's okay. Jonathan, I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to know, all right? I want to protect you, and I can't if I don't know. I won't be angry. _At least, he could keep it buried deep inside if he was. _I promise._

His other half nodded for a third time, but remained silent. The seconds ticked by, Scarecrow growing tenser as Jonathan didn't speak. He was about to ask again, as gently as he could, when Jonathan responded without a word. Instead of speaking, he opened their emotional link, and let his feelings rush out, flooding Scarecrow at the speed of light. The individual emotions were akin to specks of dust drifting through a sunbeam, and he strained to catch them, hold on long enough to know. Fear. Love. And _longing_; those were the three that came again and again.

So he did want him to reciprocate. Scarecrow felt his own hope draining. The emotions stopped as quickly as they'd come, and he was left alone with Jonathan, who watched him, speechless and apprehensive.

He hugged again, his head resting on Jonathan's shoulder and one hand cradling his alter ego's face. _It's all right. I'll help you. He never needs to know. _Scarecrow repeated the last three sentences like a mantra, at first unintentionally, until he felt Jonathan weakening. Then he carried on the repetition, until Jonathan gave him vocal, if half-hearted, agreement.

_I can make this work._


	70. Unconscious Reactions

AN: If you're wondering where I was last night, I was trying to teach myself the dance to "Thriller." Yes. I swear that there's a perfectly logical explanation for this. Unfortunately, I cannot dance, at all, despite two years of ballet (the YMCA version, but still) and my hips don't move, even the slightest bit. And yet I'm still trying. Perseverance. Either a good thing, or a sign of madness.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"So how are you, sir? Apart from the blood loss."

Bruce swallowed a spoonful of lobster bisque and stared Alfred, sitting in the chair beside the bed. He looked so calm, in spite of the fact that his ward—his son, in all ways but biological—had suffered yet another brush with death, this one closer than any of the others. And also despite the realization Jonathan Crane, the man who'd poisoned said surrogate son and _set him on fire_, appeared to be in love with Bruce. Though Alfred may not have noticed that. The man was nothing if not observant, but it was the last rational conclusion to come to. Bruce suspected that he'd only come to that decision because his sanity was frayed from prolonged exposure to madmen.

"He…" It was the last thing he wanted to bring up, let alone drag his butler into, but he _couldn't _keep silent, much as he wanted to, be it from bile fascination or masochism or sheer confusion. He wanted desperately to be wrong about this—it would make his life that much less stressful, if nothing else—and though he knew it would be fruitless, he couldn't subdue his naïve hope that telling Alfred would somehow cancel it out. As if stating the absurdity aloud would make it less real. "Jonathan…I think he—"

"I know, Master Wayne."

"What?"

Alfred's expression was a mix of his usual dry amusement, and mild disgust. Bruce tried to imagine how it would feel, having the knowledge that a remorseless mad scientist, who'd torn a third of the city apart and nearly killed both your almost-son and would-be almost-daughter-in-law before becoming an unwelcome houseguest, had gone on to lock lips with that son. He gave it a second of consideration before deciding not to put himself through such mental anguish until he regained all the blood he'd lost.

"It was rather obvious, sir, what with the burn mark and his inability to meet my eyes when I arrived in the cave. Not to mention the way he's been hovering around your door for the past two days. He couldn't have been more obvious if he'd taken out a billboard proclaiming his love."

The hovering. Bruce winced at the reminder. He'd almost been able to cancel that out. He'd been able to accept that Jonathan _might _be in love with him, but "were" and "might" were two very separate things. The last thing he could handle at the moment would be the knowledge that Jonathan was definitely madly in love, and if he only focused on the kiss in the Tumbler, it was easier to write off as a one-time reaction. The fact that he hadn't left Bruce's side—or doorway—for forty-eight hours straight was harder to disregard.

"Oh," he offered, unable to make his brain connect with his mouth to give a better response. Actually, he was having trouble with making his brain function at all.

For the briefest instant, the amusement on Alfred's features far outweighed the aversion, but he went back to a perfect mask of passivity almost the second that Bruce noticed. "Not that it isn't highly entertaining at your expense, Master Wayne, but it's also not something I care to think about when there's food around to cause further nausea." He didn't have to specify that it was the person initiating the kiss that repulsed him, and not the act itself. He didn't need to. Years of being exposed to his British manner of expression had made his feelings more than evident, even if their physical manifestation was nothing more than a raised brow or a certain light to the eye.

"Point." He took another spoonful, wishing he could forget the conflict as easily as they could change the subject. He was at a loss for how to deal with this, unable to control his own _thoughts _on the subject, let alone his outward speech and actions. How was he supposed to converse with Jonathan when he couldn't make his mouth for even the stammered half-thoughts racing through his head?

Assuming that Jonathan was ever coming back into the master bedroom. From the way he'd run off, Bruce wouldn't be surprised if he spent the rest of his stay in the manor cowering under a table, as he had during psychosis. How long that stay would be, Bruce had no idea. He'd toyed with the idea of keeping the man indefinitely, but this latest wrench in the works made him greatly question the wisdom of that decision.

"How long…" It was pushing his luck, inquiring when he'd be mobile immediately after almost bleeding out on his butler, but he needed something to distract himself. "When do you think it'll heal enough to take the stitches out?"

"No idea." The look of his eyes implied that he did have some idea, but Bruce knew better than to ask a second time. He wasn't about to reveal it, not when he had the authority to keep his master off the streets for as long as he wanted. "At least a week, and almost certainly more."

There was a time and a place to fight his battles, and lying here at the mercy of his butler, seriously injured, was not one of them. He gave a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders—immediately regretting it when his side flared with pain—and took the last bit of soup in the bowl, handing the dish and spoon back to Alfred.

"You need the rest," Alfred said as he got up, the humor nearly gone from his voice entirely. There was still a glitter in his eyes, however, and it was more apparent than ever as he added, "I imagine having a lunatic ravish you would be draining."

Bruce was aching to make a devastatingly clever retort, but between the pain and his total confusion at recent circumstances, his mind came up blank, and Alfred was out of the room before he could even stammer something idiotic out.

_He didn't ravish me. _Though, for all he knew, Jonathan might have wanted to.

No, that was ridiculous. He'd been half-dead and covered in blood. The Joker, perverse as he was, had never made love to Jonathan severely injured or blood-soaked. At least, as far as Bruce knew, and he didn't want to know any further. That could not have been a turn on, or anything besides worrying and terrifying.

_And he likes fear._

Bruce shook his head vehemently, careful not to move the rest of his body as he did. That was ridiculous. Jonathan Crane was a remorseless madman, yes. He hurt people with no thoughts as to their wellbeing, or anyone's wellbeing beyond his own, and if given the chance, he would gladly do it again, but there was more to him than that. The divide between good and evil wasn't black and white, and the more time he spent with Jonathan, the more he found him in the gray. He hadn't kissed him out of some perverted lust, or a desire to tear Bruce apart, trying to decipher the motive behind it.

_Why _he'd kissed, Bruce had no idea. He didn't presume to understand the man's way of thinking, and the deeper his glimpses into it were, the less he wanted to know. But on some level, Jonathan enjoyed his presence, despite the vocal part that hated him. Some part of Jonathan, the part he glimpsed while sitting on the couch watching Bond movies, was as human as everyone else, and enjoyable to be around, once Bruce looked past his crimes. He wasn't evil. He wasn't good, either, but somewhere in between.

Where his moral compass pointed was anyone's guess. But wherever it led, Bruce liked him, regardless.

_Wait, what?_

_

* * *

_

Are you going to talk to him?

Scarecrow leaned away from the embrace to stare at his companion. They couldn't _see_ each other, of course, not literally, but they knew where the other was sitting and what they looked like, so that gave an idea of positioning, and with their emotional link, it was easy to know their expressions. He wasn't looking at Jonathan in the standard sense, but he could still stare.

_Talk to him? _What, go up to the Batman and say "Hey, Jonathan's madly in love with you and I can't think about you for extended periods without a significant portion of my blood supply rushing to a very awkward though pleasurable place. But despite that, I want you to know that we're fine without you and Jonathan is mine and stay away from us, or I'll find a way to make you regret it." Yeah. That would go over like a pair of cement shoes. _What do you mean, talk to him? I'm not going to go in there, if that's what you want._

_No. _He felt Jonathan shake his head. _I mean, eventually he's going to heal. It's one thing to stay out of the bedroom, but we'll run into him at some point._

Scarecrow considered the size of the manor in proportion to the few rooms they'd spent time in. Even counting the night when Jonathan had gone searching through the mansion, first for the laundry room and then for the master bedroom, they'd only seen around half of the place. If that. _Debatable._

_I still have to eat. And it's not as if shifting my schedule to do that at night would help. He's practically nocturnal. _

He had a point. And going into the kitchen when the Bat was out of the house ran the risk of coming into contact with the butler. The look the man had given Jonathan upon walking up to the Batmobile made it all too clear that he knew what had transpired, and Scarecrow doubted he was happy with the situation. Given the choice, he'd rather cross the Batman than the Bat's butler, any day.

At least a fight with the Batman offered more stimulation of his nerves than just pain.

Scarecrow felt warmth flush through him at that, and clenched his fists, willing the sensation away before it became overpowering. _When did I become such a slut?_ He was starting to sound disturbingly like the Joker. True, he was more than a bit repressed—technically, they were still virgins—but that didn't excuse the animalistic lust he felt whenever he thought about the Batman's perfectly white smile or his eyes or the feel of his hands or—

Scarecrow unclenched his hands only to tighten them again, this time on the bed sheets. If he went on like this, there would only be one solution, and it would seriously undermine his "we don't need Batman" talk. _So, you want me to do the talking if we do run into him?_

This really wasn't fair. They'd been able to appreciate the beauty in others before—Harley, for example, or Ra's al Ghul—without getting hot and bothered. Hell, Jonathan had been practically _afraid _of arousal after that whole "you've been getting off on the works of James Joyce" nonsense his grandmother had put him through. He rarely so much as pleasured himself, even when going through puberty. Though Scarecrow had—and once while reading _Finnegans Wake_, just to be spiteful—much to his other half's displeasure. He'd only ever shut up about it when Scarecrow had taken it up in the shower after toxin experiments, and probably just because he was happy that his alter ego wasn't whipping it out while he was trying to take notes.

How they'd moved from that to this, Scarecrow had no idea. But it wasn't a welcome development, not from either viewpoint.

_Could you do that? I mean…_He gave the mental equivalent of a nervous foot shuffle. _Would you be…able?_

Could he do it without embarrassing them, he meant. Scarecrow considered it. The Batman tended to piss him off when he spoke, which helped to negate the lust, and as long as he wasn't touching him, he would probably be all right. At least, he could sneak into a bathroom if there was a problem. Whereas Jonathan was likely to get nervous and blurt something out. _I think so._

Jonathan hugged him, hair brushing against Scarecrow's shoulder. It had gotten so much longer, since they'd come here. _I'm sorry._

_Don't be. This isn't your fault._

He could do this, for Jonathan. He was meant to be the stronger one, after all, to protect his weaker side from danger and trauma, and attractive men covered in Kevlar. He didn't care how intoxicating the Batman made his words, or how many times he saw that damn playboy smile, he could be stronger than that, and get through a conversation without fantasizing or—

_Damn it. _Scarecrow reflected, as he slid his hand under the waistband of his jeans, that his imagination was going to be just as problematic as the Batman himself.

* * *

AN: _Finnegans Wake _(and yes, there is no apostrophe in the title) is one of James Joyce's more famous works, and if you're curious, this is what it reads like: www. trentu. ca/ faculty/ jjoyce/ fw-3. htm Yes. Good luck getting turned on by that.


	71. Conflicts

AN: So, this and next week are when all my midterms occur, and between the studying and ridiculously long essays, I'm not sure how often I'll be updating. The only reason I'm getting a chapter out now is because tonight was the midterm for my night class, so I got out as soon as I finished the test. Sorry about any delays, and I'll try to get back to my normal schedule soon.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"He can't stay like this forever."

"Debatable." Abigail rested her arms on the back of the chair she as she sat down, legs spreading to either side as she slid them in the space between the armrest and the backing. Anika sat beside her, in a papasan facing the guest room's bed. Her face was lined with cuts, mostly on the nose and chin, where the plate had shattered, and she was rubbing lotion into them, vitamin E to reduce scarring. It shouldn't scar, since none of the cuts had been deep—and all missed her eyes, fortunately—but Adrian would rather not take the chance.

He'd seen the twins suffer enough throughout his life, when he was too helpless to intervene. He hardly needed a visual reminder on top of that.

He stared at Jackie, lying motionless, flat on the bed aside from his legs, still lifted in traction. It was such a contrast from the man's normal behavior, trademarked by constant movement, even in sleep, that he would have appeared dead if not for the faint rise and fall of his chest, and the barely visible pulse in his neck, nearly concealed by his hair.

"His bodily functions won't stop because he's sedated."

"So cath him."

Adrian tried to ignore the contempt in his sister's voice and be logical about things. An exercise in futility, yes, but at least he'd have made the effort. "Absolutely not."

"Why?" She'd always been the most hot-tempered of the three, between Anika's optimism and Adrian's apathy. He didn't begrudge her for her anger—it wasn't as if he hadn't been furious himself, upon seeing his sister's bloodied face—but things were under control now with no serious damage done. Getting upset over something inconsequential, especially when being upset involved directing that fury at a dangerous madman, was asking for added trouble.

Explaining that, however, would fall on deaf ears, so he brought things down to her level. "Fine. I'll cath him, if you want to be the one to take it out while he's conscious."

Her eyes darted to Jackie's prostrate form, moving away just as quickly. For a moment, mild terror came over her features before she subdued it again, behind a mask on nonchalance that would have been convincing, had he not been her brother. "So take it out before you wake him up."

"He'd still know as soon as he next relieved himself. And I doubt he'd take kindly to that knowledge."

"We should get him a pet."

Abigail, who'd been about to make some strongly worded retort, stopped, mouth agape and features twisting with confusion as she turned to face her twin. Adrian followed suit, though he managed to conceal his incredulity. At least, he hoped so. "Excuse me?"

"Like a kitten or something." She stopped rubbing at her face long enough to gesture cat ears with her fingers, on either side of her head. "It would keep him distracted."

"What."

Adrian's immediate reaction was the same as Abigail's—complete with the lack of raised inflection—but he took a moment to ensure his words were more constructive in their disapproval. "You'd trust him with a cat?"

"He likes animals." Anika's expression took on a distant look, indicating that she was already lost in thought, daydreaming about tie-dying a kitten purple and green, or something else psychotic. He was beginning to think that their houseguest was having an adverse effect on her mental health. "Remember, how he made us change the channel when that news story about dog fighting came up?"

"You just want a cat, don't you?" Abigail brought her arms off the back of a chair and propped her elbows in their place, resting her head in her hands.

"What's your point?"

With a sigh, Adrian got off the edge of the bed and walked out the door, leaving his sisters to bicker about the potential ramifications of having a kitten versus the benefits. Taking homicidal clowns into account, of course. What he wouldn't give for a drink. Not that he drank, none of them did—the family history of alcoholism was a rather effective deterrent—but at times like these, he was tempted to try it, be it with rubbing alcohol or Listerine.

_

* * *

_

Scarecrow.

_Not—_he paused, eyes fluttering, and tried to force himself to focus past his pleasure. One wouldn't think that it was possible to stammer mentally, but as he'd found out early on in puberty, it was very possible, and plausible beyond that. At least, if said person's mind had another inhabitant. _Not now._

_But—_

He shook his head, no longer able to form words. Batman. His mind was supposed to be on the Batman, but the more Jonathan distracted him, the more his thoughts moved to the love of his life. And while he had no problem with that fantasy, he doubted his sexually repressed alter ego would find it more arousing than disturbing. It wasn't as if he could control the mental link to keep it closed at this point. _Batman._

The Batman, prick that he was, was still undeniably stunning, undeniably powerful. Jonathan would have something to say about the psychological implications of this, no doubt, if he didn't blush and change the subject every time it came up. Not that Scarecrow cared about _object petit a _or oral fixations or any of that shit, especially on the occasions where he allowed his body to indulge the dream instead of struggling to subdue it.

The Batman. He closed his eyes, let his mind wander in ecstasy, imagining the hand on his body not as his own, but as the Bat's. _His _hands, exploring their body, brushing over every scar, warm, powerful, and covered in Kevlar, hands leading into his wrists, and the spiked gauntlets there. He imagined how those would feel on his skin, raked over with increasing pressure, and shuddered in anticipation. And fear.

He was never one to admit his fears—one of the few areas where he agreed with Jonathan—but to let a monster have his way, to let himself be fucked senseless by someone who could kill him as easily as kiss him gave him a thrill that was as frightening as it was decadent. The feel of the Joker's lips on his skin was more memorable now than any of the pain he'd caused them, and Scarecrow longed to feel the Batman's lips, with or without the cowl to conceal the face he hated, under less carnal circumstances. How would _his _mouth feel, or his hands, on their face or neck, or lower? Better than the Joker's, because the Batman had ruined their mind, and that made the danger all the greater…

His free hand grasped the bed sheet, teeth clenched tightly to prevent himself from moaning. It didn't quite working, but with his body spasming uncontrollably, and his self-disgust growing as the aftershocks weakened, it was hard to focus on his half-formed vocalizations. Panting, he lay back on the bed, glancing back to verify he'd remembered to close the door. He had. Thank God for small favors.

_Scarecrow!_

_What?_ He tried to sound irritated, but the exhaustion was overpowering. Well, the emotional link was open, and that had to count for something.

_You're ruining my jeans._

_Christ, what a tragedy that would be._ He thought about getting up to resolve that issue, deciding against it when he realized it would take effort. The ebbing pleasure giving way to reality was hardly helping. This Batman thing was threatening to become a serious problem.

* * *

"Harley, you can't _know _that he's hurt."

She hated the tone of Joan Leland's voice, well-meaning but smothered with patronization, much as she hated her expression, and the calendar—displaying bright sunflowers, this month—and everything else about this goddamn office, this entire goddamn asylum. All the doctors and nurses with their plastered-on smiles, like festive zombies, the patients, be it violent or catatonic, every last one of them indifferent to her suffering.

Or the danger her love was in.

"Yes, I can, Joan." She was doing a terrible job of hiding the loathing in her voice, and she knew it, but she couldn't bring herself to care about anything but Joker, missing and surely in mortal peril, if not mortally wounded. "It's been all over the news. He can't have missed it unless he's in a coma." She went cold at the thought. _What if he is?_

"But just because the Batman's been injured—"

"There's no _just because_ about it." She hit the armrest of her chair, more out of anger than emphasis, and regretted it immediately as pain shot through her hand. Joan flinched, but didn't reach for her call button. Thank God, because if she'd end this situation in a straitjacket, she was going to lose it. "This is the Batman we're talking about. With a possible fatal injury. There is no way my puddin' wouldn't be tearing the city apart looking for him, unless something was _wrong._"

Joan pursed her lips, as if she was the one being put upon. "He doesn't know where the Batman is—"

"Like I said. He'd rip Gotham apart in the search. But he isn't. Which means he's hurt, or worse." She felt tears welling in her eyes, and wiped at them with the back of her sleeve, for once thankful that she had no makeup to smudge. "So, yes, Joan, I _can _know that."

"Maybe he's already found him?"

It was the worst placation she'd ever heard, and considering that she'd worked here, that was saying something. "Yeah, like he's found Batman and he's sleeping over at his house. That's likely." She sighed, blocking out whatever Joan said next as she pulled on the hem of her shirt, sick with worry and anger. _I hope the Batman appreciates what he's putting me through._

* * *

Like.

He _liked_ Jonathan Crane.

When the hell had that happened?

It shouldn't have been that much of a shock. He'd acknowledged that he'd become fond of Jonathan, and they'd been able to spend time together without being at each other's throats, provided that the voice in his head didn't interfere. They'd agreed to be friends, for God's sake. It was only natural that two people living together would eventually stop hating each other, and become more comfortable as time went on.

And yet this had still hit him like a lead pipe to the face.

_He's a monster._

_Liking him does not mean condoning his choices. _Bruce inhaled, as deeply as he could without hurting himself, and released, trying to will himself to believe what had always seemed common sense, until he found himself a part of it. It didn't, really. Having a friend with an eating disorder didn't mean encouraging starvation or binging. It only meant being close to someone with a devastating illness.

_Being insane doesn't excuse his actions._

He never said it had. But the rational part of his mind, at the moment, was far outweighed by the part that was a swirling, emotional mess. The more driven part of him, the side that emerged under the cowl, viewed the world in terms of black and white. And while that worked when he was fighting to survive, it was a far less effective approach in day-to-day life. But difficult to turn off.

_He's not a monster. He is not justified, but that doesn't make him evil. _Everyone—excluding the Joker, anyway—had shades of gray. Torturing people didn't make Jonathan a saint, but he wasn't the devil, either, and neither was Bruce, for enjoying his company. Someone could be a ruthless psychopath, and still be an entertaining conversationalist with a unique brand of humor and a cute smile.

_A what?!_

And to think that out of all the unspeakable horrors he'd witnessed throughout his life, from childhood to his time overseas, to his nights as Batman, _this _was what made his blood run cold. _I did not just think that. I did not just think that. I did not—shit._

No. Absolutely not. That—that was the Joker, and his perverse influence, mixed with blood loss.

A voice that he heard only rarely—and one that had only ever appeared when he was talking to women—popped up from the back of his mind, entirely unwelcome. _The Joker's been gone for an awfully long time, for that to show up now._

Then it was an admiration of beauty. He clenched his teeth. Jonathan Crane was undeniably pretty. There was no deeper meaning in acknowledging that fact.

_If there's no deeper meaning, why are you so panicked?_

God, how he hated himself.


	72. Disorientation

AN: I'd like to be able to say that I was doing something productive yesterday, such as studying for one of several tests or writing a paper or doing general homework, but no. I caught a cold (I say cold, but it's all but gone today, so I'm think that it was actually one of those forty-eight hour virus things) and ended up spending the evening huddled up in my Cookie Monster pajamas, simultaneously surfing the Internet and trying to teach myself Harley Quinn's accent, because I decided it's just not enough to have her costume.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan brushed his hair back, fingers twitching in response. Thanks to Scarecrow's carnal excursion the day prior, he'd had to remove the bandages, and while something as soft as hair was hardly enough to reopen the cuts, the sensation of _anything_ brushing against the skin his nails should be covering could hardly be construed as pleasant.

Less than ten seconds later, his hair was back in his eyes.

_I can't take this._

_You can handle being a prisoner with a raging crush, on the man who not only locked you up, but also ruined your life in the first place, and yet you can't handle your hair being an inch longer than usual?_

_More than an inch. _Jonathan thought back and realized that he couldn't remember when it had last been cut. Obviously not during his time here, but he couldn't recall if it had been done when he was last hospitalized, either. He had no memory of it, but the first few days after his meds were adjusted were always fuzzy, and considering how unbearable the switch in medication had made life at Arkham, he'd been much more concerned with escape than the state of his hair when he came to.

_Oh, right. Sorry. An inch and an eighth, then. _He felt Scarecrow's head resting on his shoulder, a gesture of equal parts exasperation and comfort. _Really, it's not that big of a deal._

Not in theory. But in theory, he was calm and relaxed and not desperately trying to keep a few facets of his life under his control. In theory, his life still made perfect sense and he hadn't compromised everything he stood for in a rush of emotions and lust. Unfortunately for him, he didn't live in theory, and in practice, an inch and eighth of extra hair—if that was a proper estimate, which he doubted—was threatening to shatter what little composure he had left.

If he was going to have a spectacular and devastating mental breakdown, he wanted it to be over something substantial, and not insufficient grooming.

_This has got to be the thousandth time I've said it, but your priorities are completely—_

_I'm cutting it._

_What?_

Jonathan stepped out of the guest bath, walking across the bedroom toward the hall. _I am cutting my hair. I've got enough on my plate without this adding to it._

For once, Scarecrow was speechless. That silence only lasted until they left the room, but it was a welcome relief. As long as he could still feel the presence of his alter ego, the quiet moments were nice. Especially at times like these, when the only alternatives were either mental bickering or thinly-veiled insults.

He really wished he knew someone else with a voice in the head not caused by madness or drug use. It'd be interesting to know if all other halves were constantly at each other's throats, or if they were the odd pair out.

_Jonathan, you know that they've locked up all the sharp objects by now, don't you? Or had you missed the fact that you've been eating with sporks since you've been in the mansion?_

At this point, he was willing to break one of those sporks and saw at his hair with the jagged plastic. _They must have overlooked something. _And the place he was most likely to find something would be a bathroom. The kitchen was too obvious, but a bathroom contained many sharp objects. If all else failed, he could break a mirror again. He wouldn't slice up his hands a second time, not if he was focused on what he was doing in place of operating under blind panic. Still, it would attract all sorts of unwanted attention, and as such, he was saving it as a last resort.

_But you don't know where the butler's bathroom is._

_I know. _Not that he'd risk venturing in there even if he did. The man was terrifying, almost as Batman's level, but without a mask or cloak or growl of a voice. And that was saying something. Something horrific.

Scarecrow halted their movement as he realized the destination. _Jonathan._

_The sun hasn't come up yet, and he lost at least a third of his blood. He's asleep. _He swallowed, tried to will himself to believe it. _He has to be._

_And if he isn't?_

_We leave. He can't follow us. _Jonathan stopped outside the door to the master bedroom, held his breath. From within, there were no sounds of movement. All he had to do was get into the bathroom and close the door. It would work. It had to. He needed some grasp on the situation, however tenuous, or he'd go mad, medicated or not.

He stepped inside. There was no sound. Another step, not even daring to breath. Silence. He ran the remaining distance, by some miracle finding the bathroom without tripping over something or crashing into the wall, and crouched down inside the doorway, waiting thirty seconds, a minute. Nothing. Exhaling, he closed the door gently, quietly, and flipped on the light. He opened a drawer as his eyes adjusted, rummaging inside.

_What are you planning on doing? Breaking the blade out of a razor?_

His hands found what he was looking for before he came up with a response. A pair of nail scissors. It hadn't been there the last time he'd looked through this bathroom—or maybe it had, and he'd just missed it in his panic—so he assumed it had been used and forgotten, overlooked instead of locked up. Whatever the reason for his presence, it would work.

_This, _said Scarecrow, ever the optimist, _will not turn out well._

* * *

The Joker blinked, and only then did he realize his eyes were open. It occurred to him that he was awake, probably, or stuck in the world's most boring dream, but he couldn't say how long he'd been conscious, or how long he'd been looking up at the ceiling. If that _was_ the ceiling. His mind didn't seem to be running at its usual speed.

"You should drink."

Turning his head—that took longer than it should have; his brain wasn't the only thing moving slow—he just worked out what had been said as his eyes focused on Anika, lying on the bed beside him, a glass of water in her hand. "Huh?" Even one syllable took so much out of him.

"You've been knocked out for over a day. Which means, one: you've got to be thirsty, and two: if you've been unconscious for that long without wetting yourself, you're dehydrated." For once, he was grateful for her abnormally high volume; it made the words easier to grasp in this state of mind. It occurred to him that her face was marred with cuts; cuts that, upon further reflection, he'd inflicted. Why, he couldn't quite remember. None of them seemed serious. Pity. "So here."

She put the glass to his lips, and he realized from the texture that it wasn't glass, but plastic—unbreakable—as he drank. It was cold and flavorless, but a welcome relief from the dryness of his throat. How long had she said he'd been out? And why was he? He couldn't think back; he was exhausted and disoriented, and it took all he had to stay focused on the present. This was how it felt at Arkham, most times.

Arkham. With the drugs. Oh. He'd be pissed if he wasn't so woozy.

"What kind of cats do you like?"

The Joker swallowed, using all the strength he had to tilt his head in confusion. He tried for a "The hell?" but his vocal cords seemed as relaxed as everything else.

"Abigail and Adrian think it's safer to keep you half-conscious, like this," she explained, sliding closer to him, and holding up a book, what he took to be an encyclopedia, open to a spread of various cat breeds. "So you won't try slamming anyone else in the face with cutlery. My argument is that you'd be better off with something to distract you. You like kittens, right?"

When the kittens were uptight narcissist doctors, yes. He wasn't sure what his opinion on ordinary cats was, not when his brain could only run one track at a time. They had claws, right? That could be entertaining. He seemed to recall that they had barbed penises, but on reflection, that might have been dogs.

"Because if you don't, there's always puppies. Or rabbits. Or snakes. I've always been a fan of boa constrictors, but—" her eyes darted down to his casts, the movement almost too sudden for his own sluggish gaze to follow. "I don't think that would be the best option when you can't move."

_Or when I'm too doped up to think straight?_ He was vaguely aware that he was angry with her, though he wasn't sure why. It probably had something to do with this whole drugged-to-the-gills thing. That would make him angry, right? It was his working theory, at least. But that couldn't have been what he broke a plate on her face for, because if that was it, he couldn't have moved to throw it.

Anika was still chattering in his ear, something about bobtails and manxes, if he was hearing her correctly. Too exhausted to devote any more thought to it, he let his head drop onto her shoulder, resolved to figure things out when he was firing on all cylinders. His last thought before sleep overtook him was satisfaction that, if nothing else, at least he was smearing makeup on her shirt.

* * *

The glowing red numbers on the digital clock read three forty-six in the morning. In other words, far too early to be awake.

It occurred to Bruce that he was lying on his side. For a moment, he took this in stride, before the haze of sleep cleared and his hands flew to the bandages, checking for moisture, or any other sign that the movement had opened the stitches. They were dry. He sighed, relieved, and realized that it didn't hurt to sigh. At least, not as much as it had. So he was healing. Thank God.

Cautiously, he rolled back onto his back. The pain was moderate, but not crippling, as it had been. He must be adjusting; a few hours of sleep couldn't repair that much damage. And it wasn't as if he'd had that much sleep to begin with, what with the emotional conflict keeping him up for hours.

_There wouldn't be a conflict if you'd stop denying the obvious, _said the voice that he'd come to think of as his severely repressed and likely psychotic libido.

Goddamn it. Speak of the devil. Maybe he'd become infected from the knife, and the disease was showing itself through delusions. There was nothing to deny, and especially not anything "obvious." Appreciating the beauty in someone of the same sex had no bearing on his sexuality. The idea was absurd, and flat-out insane when he considered the man in question.

_He's feminine enough._

Maybe this wasn't his libido, but some terrible symptom of post traumatic stress disorder. Or perhaps he really was infected, and running such a high fever that he didn't realize it. That would explain the relentless voice off, as well as its broken "logic." There was a difference between feminine and female, and no amount of delicate bone structure or long hair was going to change that.

_I'll tell you what _will _change that: desperation. How long has it been since you were last with a woman?_

Bruce gave it a second's thought before he came to his senses, and realized that he had no idea. No. No, he was not going to consider this. He wasn't going to give—well, himself—the satisfaction. Repression wouldn't make him crave men; it would make him all the more desperate for a woman.

_Well, you know what they say. There's always the one person…_

He was going to have to start seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis. While keeping his night life secret, of course. This…this was unhealthy. It didn't matter that he didn't feel an attraction—and he _didn't_—the fact that he was still giving it so much serious thought was a problem. Jonathan Crane was a friend, and an odd one at that. Nothing more.

Bruce moved his gaze around the dark room, focusing on the objects he could just make out in the dark. It was a visualization exercise; one he'd learned in the League of Shadows. Leave nothing unstudied, and consider everything about the surrounding area. What could be used as a weapon, what someone could be hiding behind, what would break easily and what would refuse to yield. It was meant as a protective measure, but it worked just as well as a distraction, at times like these.

He stopped when he came to the bathroom door, and noted the light beneath it.

_Jonathan?_

What would he be doing in the master bathroom in the middle of the night? For once, the part of him that seemed made for making smart remarks was silent, overcome by confusion and worry. There was nothing he could need in there that he hadn't been given…unless he was trying to create some sort of trap, or—the mirror. Jonathan's own mirror was gone, removed for his protection, but Bruce had replaced his after it broke. He could have shattered it again—something had woken Bruce up, after all—and taken the glass. Jonathan could be slicing himself open right now, or worse.

He bolted up, immediately regretting it as he doubled over in pain, momentarily blind from the sensation. Wincing, he sat up again, slower, and put his fingers gingerly to the bandages. Still dry. For now, anyway. Carefully, he moved his legs to the side of the bed, and stood, inch by inch, using the mattress as support. It hurt, throbbed, really, but he suspected that was due to the sudden sitting more than the injury itself. He moved to the edge of the bed, and then the dresser, making his way across the room by the furniture. It took an eternity, from his perspective.

Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, he tried the doorknob with the other, expecting it to be locked. It wasn't, and he quickly brought the other hand down, holding the door for support as it opened.

Jonathan stood in front of the mirror, entirely focused on a strand of hair he was bringing Bruce's nail scissors to.

"What are you doing?"

* * *

AN: For your daily does of random information: Cats' penises do have microscopic barbs, in case you were wondering. That little bit of information is included simply because I've never been able to get it out of my head since I first heard it in _Dr. Tran and the Toy Cack:_

Grandmother: Incidentally, don't ever get raped by a domestic cat, Mr. Tran. You know why cats always howl when they have sex? They have barbed penises that destroy the vagina on the way out, and it ruins you for all the other cats.

Should you decide to check out the whole video on Youtube, be warned that it's dead baby comedy at its finest.


	73. Stirrings

AN: Just so you know, I'm likely to become scarce in the near future, for the next week or so. I know I've said that multiple times and keep updating, but that's because I tend to procrastinate to the last minute and I'm getting down to the wire. I have a ten page paper that I need to write it before next weekend because I'm going home then, and whenever I go home, my productivity goes down to next to nothing. I also have two other essays I need to write as well as two tests this week, and my mother's coming up on Saturday for some sort of Dean's List ceremony thing (somehow I've managed to make that list, though I've got the worst time management skills ever, as showcased here) so I've essentially lost a day of studying/writing.

Wow, that was a rant. Kids, if you go to college, don't be like me. Anyway, if/when I do disappear, don't worry, I should be back soon and I'll be updating whenever I have the time.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The nail scissors missed Jonathan's hair entirely as he jerked his head upward; the points of the blades coming dangerously close to stabbing his arm as he lowered his hand. He didn't turn, instead regarding Bruce's reflection in the mirror, and from what Bruce could see of his, Jonathan's look was a mix of surprise, fear, and another emotion that he could place, but preferred not to, for fearing of prompting his lustful side into speaking again. Jonathan closed his eyes, features going blank, and when they opened again a fraction of a second later, it was Scarecrow's reflection staring back at him.

"Cutting my hair. What does it look like?"

He could do this. Conversing with the voice that hated him couldn't be that hard. There was nothing endearing about being spoken down to. Though considering his presumably-fevered state of mind, he wouldn't be too shocked if he found something to like about it. Bruce chose to speak rather than sit back and give that the chance to happen. "Why?"

"Why not?" He brought the strand of hair back up, straight at it cross-eyed while he tried to adjust the scissors.

_Because it's cute?_ In the mirror, he observed his own face twitch in response to the thought that had just run through it. Shit. He refused to acknowledge that the idea had entered his mind, or even expend the energy necessary to berate himself for it. The best recourse, at least until he'd recovered enough to devote the proper consideration to this fiasco, was to ignore it and hope it went away. "With nail scissors?"

"You've locked up all the other sharp objects, haven't you?" He glanced at the mirror long enough to glare at Bruce, before returning his gaze to his hair. Why he didn't just use the reflection instead of staring inwards towards his forehead was anyone's guess, but Bruce assumed it had something to do with avoiding eye contact. "What did you think, that this was my preferred hair cutting tool?"

Too tired, injured, and disturbed to come up with a smart remark, he leaned in the doorway, watching his companion's absolute failure to align the scissors to the angle of his hair. The way he kept his fingers so tightly clenched on handles as he adjusted the blades couldn't be good for the recovery of his hands. "What happened to your bandages?"

"They got dirty." Bruce couldn't be sure, but it looked as if, beneath his hair, Scarecrow's face had gone pink.

"Do you need—"

"I'm fine without them." He finally slanted the nail scissors to the right angle, and slid them up about an inch or so—around the length his hair had been before he'd been incarcerated, or whenever he'd recently escaped Arkham, before it had time to become unkempt. Scarecrow considered the length, clicked his tongue in apparent approval, moved the scissors down half an inch lower than that that spot, and cut, experimentally.

His hair drifted downward to the towel he'd placed on the sink, as Scarecrow stared at his reflection, frowning at the slight wave to his bangs that hadn't been there before.

"The blades are curved, you know."

"I hadn't noticed." Scarecrow glared at him before quickly averting his eyes, scowling at the scissors instead. His face had reddened again, when he looked up. Bruce caught himself smiling at that, and forced his expression back to stoicism.

_I am not finding this adorable. He isn't even a _person. And even if he was, he'd be the personification of Jonathan Crane's bad side. The part that took joy in hurting others, and being as hateful and rude as possible, without even trying to attempt civility. There was nothing adorable about that.

_Except for the way he has the nervous smile when he's embarrassed…_

Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. As if catching Jonathan's auditory hallucination or dissociative identity disorder or whatever the clinical diagnosis would be wasn't bad enough, his voice couldn't even be the distilled essence of his Batman side, but a super-concentrated horniness that had somehow mutated to swing opposite of his actual orientation.

_Unless that's always been your orientation and you're just repressed._

It wasn't even a voice, not really. Just his own thoughts, his own way of speaking, popping into his head like a worst case scenario, and always at the most unfortunate moment. Like a disturbing image that had burned itself into his mind and refused to fade away, even though it was blatantly incorrect. He only needed to think of Rachel to prove it wrong. And yet it remained. Just what he needed.

_What I _need _is a way out._

He shook his head and looked back to Scarecrow, who was angling the blades again, trying to find a way to even out the cut. "Do you want…actual scissors?" he offered, after casting about for a moment, for any way to get out of the bathroom that wouldn't seem conspicuous. The last thing he needed was for the mental patient to work out what was going through his head.

"Don't taunt me with things you're not going to give me, Batman."

Choosing not to get into it, he left the bathroom, calling "I'll be right back" over his shoulder as he did. Bruce wondered if Jonathan would still be there when he returned, and felt mild disgust as he realized, for reasons entirely unrelated to understanding or developing a friendship, that he hoped he would.

_

* * *

_

He's…he's not actually going to trust us with scissors, is he?

Scarecrow didn't answer, staring at the doorway as he considered his options. He could stay and accept the scissors if they came, which he doubted. Nail scissors were one thing—and it was already wildly out of character for the Batman to leave him alone with anything sharp, especially when he took into account what Jonathan had last done in this bathroom with sharps. But actual scissors, with long, sharp blades? No. This was some sort of trick.

The Batman wouldn't be helpful unless it benefitted him in some way. There would be no reason for it.

Besides, the butler would kill him, if he found out.

He could stay, and stab the Bat if he was stupid enough to bring scissors. He was weak from injury, and he'd lost so much blood already…but then he'd be stuck with a heartbroken Jonathan, a dead Batman, and a butler who wouldn't think twice about eviscerating him with those same scissors. _Goddamn it. _Of course when an ideal situation came about, he couldn't utilize it. Such was his life.

The last option was to leave. Now, before the Bat could return with his scissors or chloroform or whatever he'd actually gone to receive. That was the best option. He set the scissors on the sink, and turned to go.

Jonathan dug in his heels. _We can't leave._

"Damn it" didn't quite cover it. In fact, none of the curse words he knew, in any language, seemed to express his frustration, and he couldn't think of any new ones to invent that would do the trick. Closing his eyes, he struggled to control himself before he responded. _Why not?_

_Because my hair is uneven now._

It was at times like these when he wanted nothing more than the ability to strangle Jonathan; grab and shake him until he started talking sense. _Does it mean _that _much to you?_

_Yes! It's the only thing I can control in my life at the moment, and I'm not going to leave things unfinished when I can actually do something about them._ Amazing, how he could mentally hyperventilate. Amazing, and maddening.

_Fine. _He moved back to the sink, holding the nail scissors to the lock of hair framing the other side of his face. _I cut this, and then we—_

_No._

He tried counting backwards from one hundred, and didn't make it as far as ninety-nine. _What. Now._

_Those scissors don't cut right, and it makes it unevenly short compared to the rest of my hair, and you left it too long in the first place._ He said it as if he didn't realize how infuriatingly trivial the complaint was. Knowing Jonathan, he probably didn't. At least one of them was blissfully unaware. Not that it alleviated his anger. Not at all.

_You can't be serious._

_Only part of my life I have control over._

_You wear clothes, don't you?_

_They're not a part of my body, are they?_

_You pretentious little—_

"Here." And the Batman was back, holding a pair of scissors outstretched in his hand.

* * *

They were ordinary scissors, as he was unable to find a pair of styling scissors among the sharps they'd locked up, and giving him kitchen scissors seemed like asking for trouble, given how well they cut. These still had a decent edge, and a straight blade, but had duller tips. Safer, in theory, for the both of them.

His companion glared at him through the mirror, the look in his eyes so hateful that Bruce half-expected the glass to crack.

"Jonathan?"

"Scarecrow." His voice held the same venom as his eyes.

"Sorry. Here." Bruce moved forward, leaning on the sink for support. He'd been too focused on moving without falling while he walked to realize how drained the journey had made him, but now he felt it full force.

Scarecrow ripped the scissors out of his hand, blade first, and before he could even ask if the man was all right, he was bringing the hair he'd test-cut back into his line of sight, slicing it to its original angle and length. He did the same to the other side, and continued, the process working silently and acceptably, until he got to the back.

It was immediately apparent that he wouldn't be able to cut it probably, as he was unable to see what he was doing, and just as apparent from the way he was tilting his head while staring at his reflection that he was going to try anyway.

And end up stabbing himself and destroying his progress—not to mention dignity—in one fell swoop. "Here." Bruce stepped forward, held out his hand. He had yet to regain his balance, or fully overcome the pain from the knife, but his attempts couldn't be worse than what Scarecrow was attempting. "Let me."

"Go to hell." In contrast to his rock-hard tone, Scarecrow stepped backwards, in such a large stride that his back ended up pressed against the wall. The scissors were still in his hand, which, thankfully, was to his side, but Bruce thought it best to keep his distance. Better safe than stabbed.

"I'm not going to hurt you." He considered raising his hands in a gesture of peace, but decided against risking it almost immediately. "But you're going to impale yourself with those if you try."

Still glaring, Scarecrow raised his free hand, the left one, and held it, back to Bruce, so the puncture scar from the nail gun was clearly visible. "I'm used to it."

_Because you handled it so well the last time. _He didn't say it, much as he wanted to. It would be provoking, needlessly and dangerously, and it was below the belt besides. "Please."

And suddenly Scarecrow wasn't the one staring back at him, eyes hateful and posture tense, but Jonathan. Just as stiff, but with anxiety, not anger. Bruce had never realized he had that much sway over the two, assuming it had been his words that brought about the switch. He didn't know how to feel about it, if it had.

"I'm not going to try anything," he assured him, releasing his hands from the counter. Bruce was unsteady at first, but widened his stance to improve his balance. He'd need it, if he was handling scissors, especially with a madman involved. "The most I could do is cut crooked by mistake, and then it'll grow out."

Jonathan stepped forward, head moving in a way that could be either a nod or a nervous tic, and gave him the scissors before turning, slightly shaking, to face away from him.

Bruce had cut his own hair multiple times, in the League of Shadows and in the years before that, when he'd fled from Gotham without purpose. He didn't claim to be great at it—his first attempts had been horrendous—but he was decent, enough to make it presentable, and it was easier on someone else. The cutting wasn't the hard part.

The process was.

He'd never thought of hair-cutting as intimate before. Probably because he'd never cut another person's hair, least of all someone he was feeling unwilling attraction for. Now that he was here, fingers entwined in Jonathan's hair, and standing almost pressed against his friend, who was nervous and twitching and still trusting. Trusting _him_, a man who'd beaten or frightened him into submission on more than one occasion. Emotionally, he was at a loss for how to respond.

Physically, however…physically he felt the faintest _stir._

_Oh, holy hell._


	74. Discoveries

AN: Hey, everybody! You might be wondering, "Does this mean Lauralot's done with all her other stuff?" No, just that I've done the bare minimum I can do to avoid guilt tripping myself for writing fic chapters.

In other news, I saw _Where the Wild Things Are._ One sentence review (and terrible pun): More like _Where the Wild Things Aren't._

And for an odd recommendation from me: I know I usually only recommend other fics, but I've recently discovered the Youtube channel Fewdiodotcom, and figured, since it's almost Halloween, I might as well recommend some quality horror shorts. At least, I think they're quality. I'm more than a bit of a coward, but these guys can create a ridiculous amount of tension in as little as two minutes. _Mockingbird, Bedfellows, _and _Five Minutes Earlier_ are my favorites, but they're all good. Be warned that _Breach _is a screamer and _The Easter Bunny Is Eating My Candy _contains gore and (fake) violence to an animal.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

It occurred to Jonathan—or rather, Scarecrow pointed it out to him—that he was letting Batman get close to several extremely vulnerable and fatal points of his body, such as the eyes and the jugular, with scissors. It occurred to him immediately afterward that he hadn't realized that before because he wasn't concerned about it, though he knew full well that Batman could have the blades of the scissors through his larynx before he could begin to react, if the man chose to do so. But he couldn't bring himself to worry—even with the visual Scarecrow was giving him, of all the things the Bat might do—simply because he knew, without quite knowing how, that he wouldn't do it.

What did jolt him was the realization that he _trusted _Batman.

Friendship…well, it hadn't been easy, but it had been a natural process, when he considered his dependence on the man. There was no point in fighting all the time, and the Bat had been kind beyond the captivity. As for the attraction, he hadn't meant to have such a reaction, and he'd never intended for Batman to realize it, but that was beyond his control. Neither was ideal, considering their past, but trust was something else, something more dangerous than the both of them.

He'd trusted Harley. She'd gone insane and devoted herself to a monster. He'd trusted the Joker, and let himself be seduced just as Harley had, and as his mother had, with the various men in her life. Something he promised himself he'd never do. Before he'd become old enough to realize how stupid it was, he'd trusted his great-grandmother to take care of him, and believed the kids on the playground when they'd used the tactic of "C'mere, I'm not gonna hit you." The only person he'd ever trusted without a negative reciprocation was Scarecrow, and that hardly counted. To break that trust would mean to betray himself.

Years of experience had taught him that trusting anyone else was a bad, bad idea.

_Jonathan._ Scarecrow had realized it as well, then.

He held in a flinch, mindful of the blades at work near the base of his skull, and mentally stiffened, preparing himself for the shouting that would inevitably follow. But it didn't.

_Don't let him know._

_What?_ In place of screaming, there was a slow and soft tone, of command mixed with concern, and it was so unexpected that it jarred him more than a shout would have.

_That you trust him. Don't let him know. Or have you forgotten what the Joker did after you told him you felt safe around him?_

As if he could forget. Admitting that he trusted the Joker had been like dangling a particularly fat mouse in front of cat; the Joker had taken it upon himself to destroy that trust immediately, first through a violation of that faith—on camera, no less, and then by terrorizing him with a literal bloodbath. He knew Batman wouldn't do _that_, but experience had taught him that more often than not, trust ended up broken, and he didn't want to play the odds with a show of faith.

"There."

He jerked at that, glancing toward the mirror to see the Bat's reflection step away from his own, running a hand through his hair to straighten it. Either something was wrong with the lighting, or Batman was flushed. Perhaps the awkward intimacy of the situation hadn't escaped his notice, either. And it wasn't as if he shared the attraction that made this less unpleasant.

"Did you need anything else?"

He wouldn't even make eye contact. Jonathan had taken his look of shock before as just that, shock. He hadn't expected him to return the sentiment, of course, and it would have been terrible in the long run if he had. But he hadn't expected such utter repulsion either, though it made sense. He was a man. What did men fear most but threats to their manhood, blows to the ego?

"No." He directed his gaze toward the floor—out of his own discomfort, he told himself, and not disappointment—and walked away, unsure if the Bat's eyes were on him as he did, and unwilling to look back.

* * *

"Out," Alfred repeated. It wasn't a question, or a leading statement. Rather, it was flat because he apparently had no response to what he must have viewed as the sheer stupidity of the request. It was an amazing talent, the way he could display such disapproval in one word. Make something sound so idiotic in one syllable. If it hadn't been working against his favor, Bruce would have taken the time to admire it. "You want to go out."

"You're the one who told me I should see Veronica." He hoped the argument came off as "I've been unconscious for two days and stuck inside for another, and I'm going stir crazy," and not "I'm desperately trying to convince myself that my libido is acting up from lack of action and not because I'm falling in love with someone who is not only criminally insane, but also a man." Alfred was quick to pick up on these things, but he was banking on the hope that this was too bizarre for anyone to pick up on.

"I didn't mean when you were severely injured."

"It's been four days. And I've walked around this morning without tearing the stitches." It _hurt _to walk around, yes, and took more effort than it should not to injure himself, but it wasn't the paralyzing pain of the day before, and it was far preferable to the mental anguish he would continue to suffer if he didn't get out of here and see a woman.

It didn't matter which woman. Any woman. Because he liked _women._ Not men, no matter how effeminate or helpless they were. He held nothing against those who did, but he did not, plain and simple. And the fact that he felt the need to reassure himself of his orientation was a sign of how very wrong this situation had become.

"Don't think that I don't know what this is about, sir."

Bruce twitched, despite his efforts not to. "It's about getting out of the house, Alfred. That's it."

He didn't cross his arms or raise a brow, because he could convey his skepticism perfectly well without outward cues. Another talent. "And it has nothing to do with the hopes that a certain up and coming reporter might be there for questioning, to see how much they know?"

Bruce could have slapped himself, for not thinking of that on his own. He hoped Alfred had missed the sudden light to his eyes. It wasn't bad enough that this insanity was making him question his owns stability. It had to make him inefficient, as well. "It isn't about that." At least that came out sincere; it honestly wasn't. "Alfred, I know what it looks like, but I just…I _need _to get out. I need something mindless as a distraction for once, not a cover. I'm falling apart."

There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch for several weeks.

Alfred gave the smallest of nods in concession, with his expression hardening to the same degree. "If you're lying, Master Wayne, you'll wish you hadn't lived to regret it."

Trying to keep from smiling too widely, he nodded as well. "I'm not."

* * *

Abigail stood over the bed, a medicinal vial of clear liquid in one hand. A syringe in the other. She stuck the needle through the rubber seal, pulled the plunger back. The Joker, lying below her, could just make out the liquid flowing from one vessel to another.

"Don't." Talking was easier than it had been the night before, but still delayed. Whatever they'd injected into him when last they did it had yet to fully leave his system. She was going to shoot him up again before it could clear out, leaving him trapped in an endless state of…not-fuctioningness, and the Joker had come out of it enough to realize that he didn't like that idea in the least.

She ignored him, pressing the plunger down a bit to force out the air. Some of the drug came with it, arcing through the air and onto the carpet below.

"'Gail. I won't do it again."

"No, you'll just do something else terrible, as soon as you get the next chance." There was no humor in her face, or compassion. In retrospect, nailing her sister in the face with a plate hadn't been the best idea. The twins were willing to overlook violence to themselves, even if their brother wasn't, and they seemed to take threats to Adrian in stride, but whenever he touched one of the girls, the other two members of the household jumped him. It really wasn't fair.

She began to roll back his sleeve, and he jerked his arm away. He still had the strength to do that, though if she were to go for the leg, he'd be helpless.

"Hold still."

"I'm sorry."

That one gave her pause, even if it was just to fix him with an incredulous look. Like one a teacher might give a student who'd actually tried the "dog ate my homework" claim. "You are not."

_No shit._ He thought about shrugging, but it would waste precious energy. "I shouldn't have done it. I know that."

"You still did."

"You had to take care of your sister, right?"

Abigail stared again, but with guarded confusion, this time. "Excuse me?"

"Growing up. She was the weaker one?" It didn't take a genius to realize that these kids had been severely abused. Why else would they be so willing to associate with the devil and risk their safety for the sake of money they could make from any other criminal, or even legitimately. And Anika was the idealistic, happy-go-lucky one, so it wasn't hard to deduce that she'd either endured the least suffering, or snapped as a result. "And when I hit her…it brought that all back…right?" He wasn't so sedated that he couldn't string a sentence together, but it never hurt to appear vulnerable, and make her think she had more power.

"Did she tell you that?"

"Nuh-uh. I didn't…want to bring that back. I didn't think about what…it would do…I didn't think…" The Joker paused, as if he'd lost his train of thought. "I just wanted to know…I shouldn't have hit."

"No." Her voice was firm, and she did a decent job of looking impassive, but her eyes gave the emotional softening away. Somewhere beneath his concentration and fatigue, he reflected that playing someone like a violin was so incredibly entertaining. He missed it. He needed to do more of it, when he got out. "You shouldn't have."

"It's been…a week, hasn't it?" Close enough, if it hadn't. He still wasn't sure how long they'd kept him out. "I'll leave…like I said. I just want to know."

A flicker of hesitation, through the mask of indifference.

"It's bad, isn't it? I…want to hear it from you…Gail. I'd rather hear it from you. Just…tell me, and I'll go."

So she did.

* * *

It was nine that night, or briefly past it, when Bruce found Vicki Vale.

She'd taken steps to conceal herself, though it hadn't made her difficult for him to find. Mostly because he'd taken solace in the same nook of Veronica's penthouse that he had, on more than one occasion, staying out of the public eye, concealed in the inlet of wall between the main room and the kitchen, whether to consider a case or just to be alone. He'd spotted her almost at once—though no one else seemed to—but he'd been mobbed upon entering by all the friends he'd neglected lately, and it had taken over half an hour of explaining that no, he had not begun a wild love affair, he'd just been sick, before he could untangle himself from the crowd and reach her.

"Environmental charities not a focus of your latest article?" he guessed, speaking as he walked over to her. From what little he remembered of Vicki Vale, combined with what he'd read about her, she was made of strong stuff, but it would hardly aid communication to sneak up on her so soon after an assault. There was a scarf around her neck, silk and thick enough to cover the bruises there from the attack.

"Bruce." She smiled, as he noted that they were on a first name basis. He needed to work on remembering personal conversations, badly. Villains in the mansion were not an excuse. Vicki sighed, glancing down at her drink before she raised her head, and smiled again. "Just…not used to being the focus of attention. Especially when I haven't done anything to deserve it."

"You caught the mob in the act, didn't you?" He didn't mention Batman. Whatever details on organized crime she'd managed to discover before being caught could be useful, and he didn't want to jog her memory of his alter ego when whatever he could have revealed while injured was hazy.

"And almost got killed for it." She shook her head, earrings swinging gently with the movement. "God, that was stupid of me."

"Just a bit."

Vicki tugged on the end of her scarf, brows creasing. "And the Batman could be _dead_. The one person who won't let this city fall into corruption. Because I was an idiot and had to bite off more than I could chew."

"Hey." He thought of putting his hand on her shoulder, deciding against it. "He'll be fine. If he survived the Joker, he can survive that."

"The Joker never put a knife in his ribs," she countered. "And weren't you the one who called Batman a menace to society?"

"Doesn't make him less resilient." He tried for nonchalance without flippancy, and judging from Vicki's expression, he succeeded. "At least you're all right. Focus on that."

"No thanks to me," she muttered. "At least it restored my faith in humanity, somewhat." With the hand that wasn't holding her drink, she brushed her hair behind her shoulders. "God only knows what would have happened if it weren't for those twins."

He froze, nearly spilling his own glass as he jolted. Thankfully, she hadn't noticed, preoccupied with staring out the windows on the other side of the room. "Twins?"

She nodded, absentmindedly running a finger along the rim of her glass. "They didn't make the news article. People were more focused on the spectacle, of course. But yeah, it was a pair of twins that let me into their apartment after I got away. No one else answered the door. Not that I can blame them—I mean, you don't answer the door after dark in Gotham—but still. I was running for two blocks, you'd think _someone _would have taken pity before them."

He nodded, would have swallowed nervously if his throat wasn't too dry. "People can be cold." There was a beat of silence, before he took the plunge. "Did you get their names?"

Vicki turned to face him, the reporter within showing in her face. "Why?"

"Because I think they deserve a thanks," he improvised, praying it wasn't completely see-through. "For…taking the role of the good Samaritan. It's not something many people do, especially in this city."

She arched a brow, but in good humor. "Is that compassion I'm hearing?"

"I'm not completely heartless," he said, laughing in mock offense. "My parents would have done that."

The mollification was instantaneous. "I didn't catch their last name," Vicki said, words slowing in thought, "or their address. One of them was Abby…no, Abigail. They were both brunette, waif-like. Sort of like…who was that actress in _Girl, Interrupted_?"

"Winona Ryder?" he asked numbly, barely able to focus on the conversation at hand, over his racing thoughts and pounding heart. The twins…the Joker…and Vicki knew their location. He'd never put much stock in luck, but this was a hell of a good streak.

"Right. Didn't get the address either…but it was on South Loomis…maybe three or four doors south of the convenience store?"

Bruce forced himself to nod, aware that he needed to end the conversation and make his exit as soon as possible, find a way to get into the cave without Alfred noticing, or tearing the stitches. The butler was going to kill him, but if he found the clown…it would be worth it.


	75. Visit

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Abigail yawned, body stretching across the couch, her copy of _The Zombie Survival Guide_ nearly slipping from her fingers. She secured her grasp on the paperback and straightened, rubbing her eyes with the back of the free hand. She glanced down at her wrist, remembering halfway through the action that she wasn't wearing a watch, and sighed. Whatever time it was—and it couldn't have been later than eleven—the psycho clown-sitting had taken its toll. She knew that she ought to sleep, but in the same way she knew that light travelled fast enough to circle the Earth over seven times in a second, or that the sum of two squares that met at a right angle was equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Undeniably true, but it was hard to see how it affected her.

Just as it was hard to see how she was going to get to sleep without knowing whether or not a chainsaw made an effective zombie-killing weapon. Instinct told her no, but she wouldn't feel secure until she saw the answer in print.

Trying and failing to hold in another yawn, she pulled herself the rest of the way up, grabbing the Joker card she used as a bookmark—in Abigail's opinion, there was a special circle of hell for those who broke the spines of books—and sticking it between the pages. She set the guide down and forced herself to stand. _Coffee. Who needs sleep when you've got caffeine?_ Legal drug, and all that jazz.

The walk to the kitchen seemed longer than it should have, increased by fatigue. She tugged on her shirt as she moved, smoothing out the wrinkles lounging had caused, and reflected that she really wanted to use this pattern again. _Are peasant tops still in style?_ Not that she'd ever followed any conventions apart from her own.

The coffee pot was still half-full—they'd started keeping it stocked twenty-four seven when Jackie moved in—though cold. She poured a glass into her favorite mug, the one reading "To Sew or Not to Sew: What a Stupid Question," slightly chipped and faded from years of use, and placed it in the microwave oven. Abigail watched it rotate for a moment, the light of the microwave illuminating the ivy wallpaper they'd put in when they remodeled, the only "flowery" pattern Adrian hadn't objected to. Then she crossed the room to the refrigerator and pulled out the milk, arriving back at the microwave just as it beeped. She took a moment to appreciate the scent of the coffee before she placed it on the countertop and poured, watching the contents go from nearly black to a pale, cloudy brown before she moved to put the milk carton back.

When she turned back around, the Batman was standing in the doorway.

* * *

He'd promised Jonathan that he wasn't going to hurt anyone—not that he would have anyway, not unless it was unavoidable—and he swore to himself that he'd uphold that promise, regardless of how conflicted he felt toward the man in his house at the moment. This woman and the others—if there were others; he hadn't seen anyone through the windows but in his haste to get in he'd given it little more than a cursory glance—were safe, unless they pulled a gun on him, and even then he'd try for the least force necessary. They had nothing to fear by way of injury.

But it occurred to him only as she gasped, hands flying to her mouth as fear spread across her face—the milk carton, closed, fell back on the counter—that appearing in her kitchen like some sort of horror movie monster hadn't been the best of ways to start a conversation. At all.

He nearly opened his mouth, the words "I just want to talk" forming on his lips, but dying there as he realized it wouldn't sound in any way reassuring, coming out as a growl. He'd have to speak eventually, but rasping at her while she was unlikely to have regained rational thought past her shock was not the time to do it. Instead, he remained still, letting her make the first move.

She lowered her hands with a nervous giggle, and it dawned on him, suddenly and inappropriately, that she did bear a passing resemblance to Winona Ryder, though less polished and longer-haired, among the other differences. "God. You _are_ scary."

"I want to talk—"

The woman held up a finger in a silencing gesture, something he'd never experienced before, unless the motion came from a villain. Her other hand went to her mouth again, to conceal the smile growing on her face. He'd assumed it was a nervous smile, an assumption he was starting to doubt. "Wait a second."

And then she was gone, bolting through the door on the other end of the kitchen, disappearing into a room down the hall as he reached the doorway. He braced a gloved hand on the door frame before continuing, wincing at the effort running had caused. He'd be lucky if he hadn't ripped the stitches. Alfred was going to kill him.

There was no way the man couldn't have realized that he'd slipped out. He'd been quiet about coming back in, yes, but it hadn't been late when he'd arrived, and the sound of his car arriving at the manor would have been a dead giveaway. He'd thought of slipping through the waterfall, but considering the injury and the bandages, it had never moved past a thought. Alfred, to his credit, had never confronted him, in the manor or the cave, but he must know.

He couldn't imagine what he'd be in for when he arrived back.

Assuming he _did _arrive. For all he knew, she was retrieving a gun in there, and while he could almost certainly evade an attack, the fact remained that he was injured, and that made the "almost" exponentially more serious. He was hampered when he ran, and he could only imagine how his ability to twist and bend in a fight had been fettered. "I only want to talk to you." Batman lessened the growl to his voice as much as he could while keeping it disguised, started cautiously down the hallway.

She emerged in the doorway, a small, dark object in her hands. Not a gun, as he'd expected, but a doll, clad in dark fabric, with a shape similar to a Raggedy Ann. He didn't need to see it from the front to realize what the design was. The cape and the ears on the cowl were a dead giveaway.

_The hell?_

Holding the doll up to eye level, about half her arm's length away, her dark eyes darted back and forth between it and him. The tip of her tongue was visible between her lips, and she was chewing on it, gently, as she glanced. He opened his mouth only to close it immediately, realizing he was at a loss for anything to say. Then she lowered the doll, her smile returning. "I got your armor right."

He thought it best to remain silent, as opposed to speaking, which would betray his confusion and ruin what little effect his presence might have.

Her eyes positively sparkled, cheeks flushing with color. "It's—there are so few pictures of you, and then you switched to the separating plates and I—God, must have spent four hours redesigning, but it's _perfect._"

Batman was preparing to say something stern; something not quite threatening, but forceful enough to snap her out of her unnerving glee, and make her talk sense. Something to remind her that she was speaking to the Caped Crusader, and not a celebrity she particularly admired.

He didn't get the chance to speak, though, before she dove at him, arms wrapped around his torso in what he took for an attack before realizing, to his bewilderment, that it was more of a tackle-hug.

_

* * *

_

I disgust him.

_Jonathan._ Scarecrow spoke with the careful, measured tone of someone about to lose his temper despite his best efforts to stay restrained. _It doesn't matter._

There was a copy of _The Haunting of Hill House_ on his lap, and the chair around him, the entire corner of the library, really, was dominated by other such novels, terrifying, thought-provoking, or just particularly well-written—or all three—but he couldn't bring himself to focus on any of them. And he'd tried a good twelve or so before starting this conversation. _It does._

_You didn't _want _him to return your feelings, remember?_ He felt Scarecrow sigh, run a hand through his hair. _You were trying to keep it hidden, as much as you could._

_Still. I don't know, just…_Jonathan trailed off, unable to finish, because he _did _know. Some part of him wanted this, painful and unhealthy as it would be. Some part of him needed affection, affection that only another physical being could satisfy. He ought to be disgusted with himself for such weakness, and he was. But that didn't make him want it any less.

_I know, _Scarecrow said, and while his tone indicated that he did _not _know, it also sounded as if he was truly trying. _Just—you're better without him, all right? He can be nice, I know, but at the end of the day, he's the one who hurt you, and he's only a reckless, thrill-seeking playboy who—_

_That's not true._

_What?_ He asked it harshly, probably more than intended. Enough to make Jonathan tense, the book threatening to fall from his lap.

_The thrill-seeking, _he said, shocked by his own daring. There was nothing to be gained from it but a fight, yet he couldn't seem to help himself. _He was stabbed. You saw how much blood he lost. He could have been killed—_would _have been, if I hadn't stopped the bleeding. He wouldn't risk himself like that if it was only about satisfying a rush. I…I don't think he's right, in what he does, but he does it to help people. At least, in his point of view. It isn't about the adrenaline rush for him._

Scarecrow was silent, and that managed to be worse than any shouting could have been.

_

* * *

_

Has everyone in this city gone mad?

Behind the mask, he winced, trying not to fall on her. It would have been easy, though she had caught him off balance, if her body hadn't managed to hit the injured area of his midsection, head on. Whatever luck he'd had at Veronica's fundraiser had all but faded entirely. "Miss—"

"Abigail," she said, pulling away unexpectedly, nearly knocking him over again. "You can call me that, I mean." She giggled again, not flirtatiously or out of anxiety, but happily, as she dropped to the carpet, grabbing his cape to inspect it. "This…this is fantastic. Jackie said it gets stiff when you jump, so you can actually glide—what fabric is this?"

This was ridiculous. Ridiculous didn't begin to cover it, but it was the best word his mind could come up with, when faced with such stunning illogic. He breathed in, ignoring the pain that rocketed through him as he did, and knelt down, taking the woman—Abigail—by the back of the shirt and lifting her to meet his eyes. It was the right arm he used, on the side where he'd been stabbed, and the pain was almost staggering, despite how light she was. He forced himself to push past it. "Enough."

She pouted. She actually _pouted._ It became immediately clear as to how this family managed to survive serving the Joker, if the other two were anything like her. "Can you at least tell me what it's called before you do the growly-scary thing?"

"Your brother set the Joker's legs?"

Her demeanor hardened, for the first time since her initial fear. "Are you having him arrested?" She didn't struggle, remarkably steady for someone dangling off the ground, but she pulled a foot back, and he held her out farther to keep any kicks from connecting. Another wave of pain.

"No." He softened the growl again. "I'm not here to punish any of you. I mean you no harm. I'm only trying to find the Joker."

"Do you promise?"

"Yes."

She didn't look convinced. "Put your hand on heart and cross your eyes? 'Spiders, snakes, and a lizard's head, if I break my word, I'll die 'till I'm dead'?"

"Did he set the Joker's legs or not?"

"Only twice." The grin was back yet again, and with it a snort. "You'd think that Jackie would have some sense, wouldn't you, to take on the mob and yourself and everything else he does, and not get killed, and still somehow he lacks the common sense to figure out basic things, like that breaking plates in people's faces costs him privileges, or that he shouldn't try moving around on skates when his legs are broken. He's got no sense of preservation at all, really. It would be infuriating if it wasn't funny, and it still is, the way he expected us to wait on him hand and foot and entertain his ridiculous demands the entire time we—"

"Wait." Somewhere in the mess of an answer had been pertinent information. Was she saying the Joker was _with _them? "You're caring for him?"

"We _were_, up to—" Abigail's eyes drifted in thought, trying to pinpoint the time without a watch. "A few hours ago." She met his eyes, looking honestly sympathetic. "You just missed him; he was staying in the guest room, sleeping with that—" she pointed to the doll—"every night. He was in traction."

He'd broken his legs again, then, as she'd indicated. And Batman had come so close to finding the clown incapacitated. _Goddamn it._ "Where did he go?" His tone was harsh, but he couldn't care enough to control it.

"Do you honestly think he'd tell us?" Her eyes widened again, fearful. "I'd tell you if I knew—really, I would—he's already paid us, but I don't. He just called his men and left, and we weren't even looking out the window when he drove off so I can't give you so much as the direction he left in, and Anika and Adrian would tell you the same thing, _will _tell you the same thing if you stay until they get back—"

"Enough." There was nothing in her voice or body language to indicate a lie. Which made it all the worse. "Tell me everything that happened, before he left."

* * *

Abigail had recounted the story of the Batman's injury to Jackie, and he'd taken it surprisingly well, aside from the very beginning, when he'd grabbed her arms and demanded to know if his Bat was all right. There were bruises there now, dark ones, which she rolled up her sleeves to show Batman with almost alarming indifference. For a moment after she'd recounted it, he stayed silent, unnervingly so, especially since she'd expected his reaction to be a screaming fit. Instead, he'd spoken with relative calm, and only to ask one question.

"Is Jonny back at Arkham?"

"What?" she'd asked, and immediately regretted it, stepping out of grabbing range.

"Jonathan Crane. The Scarecrow. You remember him." He hadn't waited for a nod of assent. "On the news. Has there been any mention of his being recommitted?"

"No."

He'd been silent again, sucking on his scars after a small nod, worry well hidden except for the way his fingers twitched against the blankets. She'd gone to get Adrian, to do whatever it was that he wanted to reinforce the casts, and within an hour Jackie was in a wheelchair in their living room, waiting for his henchmen to arrive. She and Anika had hugged him goodbye—he'd asked, and despite her sense of foreboding, he was gentle—and then gone to the guest room to retrieve the few things he'd brought with him.

When they returned, he'd gotten hold of Adrian, somehow, twisting their brother's arm behind his back, unmoved by their pleas to release him.

"I only wanna break his wrist," he'd said, as thought it was perfectly reasonable. "He's got another hand."

"When we were kids," Anika had said, with better composure than Abigail would have expected, "our father used to play this…game. He didn't do it often, because he only did it to hurt Adrian, and Adrian was usually smart enough to stay out of his way. He—he used to take the two of us, Abigail and me, and say "pick one." To get beaten. That, or he'd do it to Adrian. Pick one. And Adrian never would. He'd rather get hit."

Jackie had licked his lips, tilted his head. "And your poin_t_ is?"

"That he doesn't deserve it."

Jackie was, unsurprisingly, unmoved. Abigail was more straightforward. "If you get hurt again, he can't help you if he's in a cast."

So he'd broken a few ribs instead, and left enough money to pay a hospital bill—and the charge of his own treatment—five times over. They'd been helping Adrian off the floor when he left, too preoccupied to say goodbye, let alone note his direction.

* * *

"And that's the way it was."

He gritted his teeth, tried to hold in his frustration. "And you're certain he didn't give your brother or sister _any _hint, when you were out of the room?"

"It's possible. You can ask them when they get back from cat-searching. Ani wants a kitten," she added, as if he'd asked, "and she wanted to search the streets for one that was abandoned, one that really needed help. He might have told them, but I can't see why he _would_." She shrugged, and the gesture pulled on his arm in a way that jerked the stitches, painful enough for him to drop her as he leaned against the wall, bringing his hands to his side.

"Are you all right?" She got back up, with no sign of agitation at having been dropped.

"Fine."

"Obviously not." Pulling his hand away, she placed her hand on the Kevlar. "You're wounded, beneath this?"

"It's treated."

"Not well enough, if you're straining yourself and all hunched over like that." Her brows came together, and concerned, she ran a finger along the edge of the plate, as if looking for a spot to pull it loose. "Let me see."

"It's nothing."

"I can treat wounds. Show me."

"No."

She nodded, stepped back. Grateful for the space, he straightened up, and she spun towards him as he did, bringing her leg up and out so her foot struck his side, near but thankfully not on the stitches. Another blinding flash of a pain, accompanied by a shove to his shoulders that knocked him onto the floor. She sat on top of his thighs, immobilizing him until the haze of agony cleared. "There. Now let me see."

"You…you crazy—"

"I didn't kick where you're injured and you know it. Show me." She grabbed what little she could of the armor, tugging on it to no effect. He brought his hands up, grabbed her arms where the Joker had, and flipped to the side as she yelped, switching their positions and pinning her to the carpet.

His voice was more animalistic than human now. "Don't you ever do that again."

She opened her mouth to respond and stopped, eyes glancing backward. Her head tilted to follow shortly after, staring down the hall. "Hey guys. You found a cat?"

Batman raised his head to see Abigail's shorter-haired twin, and older brother, the former clutching a mewling tabby to her chest, and both with expressions of confusion, as they took in the masked man straddling their sister.

_

* * *

_Scarecrow's voice was dripping with disgust.

You want this.

_No, I don't._ He raised his glasses up, for a moment, to rub at his eyes. Exhausted, his feet traced the path back to the guest bedroom on autopilot, and he couldn't even muster the energy to feel concern at the fact that living here had become so routine. _I want to get out of this place._

_Could have fooled me._

_I make him sick. Why would I want to stay?_

_Because you still want him. You hug him, you follow him around like a lost puppy, and now you've taken up defending him. What's next, love poetry?_

_Enough. _He felt terrible without his alter ego adding to that. He was sick with the conflict, the attraction he felt that went against everything he stood for, the fear at rejection—or even acceptance—the wonder of what must be wrong with him, to feel this way. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was tearing him apart inside, stitch by stitch, and he could not handle it. Not now. All he wanted was to lie down, and sleep, long and hard, enjoying the soft blankets and bed for once without feeling guilty about it.

The only issue being, as he found when he opened the door, that someone was already lying on it.

"Hey, kitten. How've ya been?"

* * *

AN: _The Zombie Survival Guide _is a real book, and a great one. Informative, and hilarious, and I highly recommend it.

Abigail's "hand on your heart" bit is a modified quote from Disney's _Robin Hood, _originally going "If I tattletale, I'll die 'till I'm dead." Yes, I am a Disney fangirl.


	76. Comfort and Worry

AN: And in case you were wondering: No, I'm not done with everything yet, but I have started, at least. And to think that none of my classes last year, either semester, had a midterm of any kind.

The store that Anika mentions in this chapter is a reference to the Korean convenient store the Joker frequents in 4ofCups's fan fiction_. _And B and E is breaking and entering.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan stood in the doorway, silent, trying to work around the disconnect between what his eyes were seeing and what his mind knew to be true. The Joker was lying on the bed, but he _couldn't _be lying on the bed. That would involve removing the bars from the window—the shades were closed, so he couldn't check their status—disabling the security system, at least the part affecting the frame, pulling himself through the window, and walking to the bed. And while that wouldn't have been difficult for the Joker under ordinary circumstances, wouldn't even require thought, it was a different story when the lower half of his legs was completely encased in enough plaster to cover the walls of the guest bedroom.

If it weren't for the knowledge that Batman was giving him the meds at regular intervals, he would have assumed he was hallucinating.

The Joker shifted on the bed to face in his direction—from the ways up, at least; he didn't attempt to move his legs—and let the corners of his mouth drop as far as the scars would allow them, in an exaggeration of offense. "What, you're not even gonna say hello? Or ask how I'm doing? That hurts, Jonny."

"I…" He couldn't be hallucinating, because that would mean he'd have built a tolerance to the meds. And while that was far from impossible, it would have been a process, a gradual relapse. The symptoms would have appeared bit by bit, not suddenly materialized in the form of a broken clown lounging on the bed. "How did you get in here?"

"Uh, through the window?" His tone implied that it ought to be obvious.

"But your legs—"

The Joker moved again to lie flat, stretching his arm to the far side of the bed. A gloved hand disappeared over the edge, reemerged holding a pair of crutches. "Not recommended," he said, as Jonathan closed his mouth, "but not impossible."

_Still completely idiotic_, Jonathan thought, taking in the casts and the damage that must lie beneath them. _I thought Batman said he barely fractured those._

_He lied. Not surprising._

As if the situation wasn't confusing enough without dragging the Bat debate back into it. "And the bars and alarm?"

"Crowbar." If the Joker had on him, he didn't produce it. That was probably for the best. "And alarms aren't that hard, angel. No offense, but you kinda suck at villainy if you can't do a simple B and E."

Jonathan chose to ignore that. "How did you pull yourself through the frame?" There was no way he'd done it alone, not when he was that badly hurt. Then again, he did enjoy pain. Still, he doubted that anyone, even the Clown Prince of Crime, would be that reckless.

"Henches. And no, they're not hiding under the bed," he said, following the movement of Jonathan's eyes. "I left 'em outside, and they know better than to, uh, draw attention to themselves."

All right, so he hadn't lost it. Jonathan took a few seconds to feel relief, only to have it snuffed out as the full implications of the Joker's presence dawned on him. It wasn't as if good things ever happened when the clown was around, and given how much he'd wanted out when Jonathan had last spoken to him, the reappearance became all the more unnerving. The Joker seemed less like a person, as of late, and more like an omen of misfortune that appeared whenever it was least convenient.

"Hey." The Joker waved a gloved hand back and forth. "What's with you, kitten? Aren'tcha happy to see me?"

And in spite of all logic telling him he ought to walk—or run—away, hide until the Joker left, the Bat came home and dragged him back to Arkham, or the butler happened across him and just…British-ed him into leaving, he was happy. Because seeing a familiar face that was nice even part of the time, and wasn't a part of this latest madness, was a welcome relief. "I…I'm glad you're here?"

The pretense of indignation disappeared from the clown's face, replaced by a smile. Jonathan couldn't tell if it was genuine or not; for all his skill at reading his patients, he'd never been able to read the Joker, much as he'd never been able to read Batman. "I'm glad you're not, uh, slashing into yourself with electrical plugs anymore?"

Reflexively, he glanced down at the sleeve concealing the two latest scars. So that was where they'd come from. Despite his best efforts, he felt his face redden at the reminder.

"You're not mad, are you?"

Jonathan thought about it, shook his head. He knew that he should be, between the insanity and the abandonment that had let circumstances escalate into this current mess, but it was difficult to view it as anyone's fault besides his own. He'd trusted the Joker to do the right thing, which was like trusting a toddler not to touch a plate of cookies when left alone with them. It had been his mistake.

"Good." The Joker held out both arms this time. "C'mere."

He'd be disgusted at himself for how much he enjoyed the ensuing hug, if he wasn't too busy being strangely comforted.

* * *

Neither sibling responded to Abigail's question, which Bruce—his darker side seemed to have disappeared, no doubt driven off by the madness—completely understood. Questions about finding cats, especially self-evident questions, had to pale in comparison to the sight of a masked outlaw pinning their sister to the carpet. Oh, this was going to be fun to explain.

Her twin—Anika, she'd said—stared, absentmindedly petting the kitten clinging to her shirt as she opened her mouth to speak. "Are you…are you, like, about to score with the Batman?"

Bruce had to try very hard to keep his own jaw from dropping. Evidently, he didn't understand them at all. _What is wrong with these people?_

Adrian, at least, had the expression he imagined any older brother would have upon coming home to find a stranger straddling his sister. "Anika, get the gun."

"Oh, relax, you guys." Abigail shifted beneath him, trying to pull her arms free, and he loosened his grip. "Batman came here to find out if we have any information about where Jackie went, and he promised not to turn us in or anything, so we don't have to kill him or move or whatever. Only he's hurt on the right side of his stomach and he wouldn't show me so I knocked him over to get a better look, and he got mad about that and grabbed me. It's totally cool."

He wasn't sure what he found more surreal, her nonchalant explanation, or the way the others seemed to shrug and take it in stride. "Did you tell him we have no idea where he's gone?" Adrian asked. The one who Abigail said had had his ribs broken, and now that Bruce took a closer look, he could see the faint outline of binding beneath the man's sweater.

"Yep. I think he wanted to hear it from all of us, though." She pulled her arms fully out of his grasp, and started to wriggle out from underneath him. He moved to stand, bracing himself for the pain of it, and found the other twin—having passed the cat off to her brother—standing over him, holding out a hand to help.

Against his better judgment, he took it, only to have her play with his cape the moment he was upright.

* * *

All right, so the Joker had injured him on more than one occasion—and one such occasion had nearly killed him—broken his trust every chance he got, and once tried to torch him with a flamethrower. That alone should be enough to make Jonathan wary of his presence, without adding on the scent of unwash and gingivitis, mixed with the smell of gunpowder, blood, and gasoline that lingered on his coat. And yet something about his embrace—maybe the moments they'd shared together before things had gone to hell, or just the sensation of being held by someone with a physical body—was immensely comforting in spite of that.

"So, uh, how much blood did Batsy lose?"

He jolted at the memory, not seeing the purple coat and green-blond hair he'd was lying against, but Batman, lying half-dead in the Batmobile, bleeding out and unable to look at them. He raised a hand to the scab on his cheekbone from the burn, blushing again as he remembered the kiss, the realization two days later that Batman knew what he'd done, the agonizingly awkward moments, the Joker's dark eyes right in front of his own—

"Angel. What's wrong with you?"

He blinked, registering the Joker's hands on either side of his face. "Nothing." He was struck with the immediate and terrible realization that there was no statement more likely to get his neck snapped than _I've got a crush on the Batman. _"I—just, how did you…I mean, I'm sure you saw the news, or—" he glanced at the casts, decorated with sketches in green and purple, and almost certainly the work of Anika and Abigail. "They told you, but—did you fight him? How did you know he was okay?" What if he had fought him? What if Batman was kidnapped, or mortally injured?

"'Cause of you."

He swallowed hard, trying to determine what that meant, and if he was likely to be killed. "I don't follow."

"There was nothing about _you_ on the news," the Joker explained, keeping his hands in place and stroking Jonathan's hair with his fingers. "And I knew Batsy's butler wouldn't keep you around if he was dead, or near dead, or mostly dead, or whatever. Now, judging from what I've seen of the guy, he could've have had you recommitted, or he could have just shot you and thrown your body in the Batcave—" Jonathan, seeing that as entirely plausible, shuddered and the Joker held slightly tighter. "But seeing as you're here and, as far as I can tell, breathing, then Batsy's gotta be okay."

Jonathan nodded, wishing more than anything that Scarecrow could take over, and show the realistic calm he was unable to convincingly force. But the Joker could tell the difference between them, and to switch now, so suddenly, would be an even more blatant giveaway that he was hiding something. There was hardly any love lost between his other half and the clown, and the nervous silence on the other end of the link told him that Scarecrow couldn't come up with a plausible reason to appear either. _Hell. _"He's—he went to a party or something. Had to make a public appearance, I guess, to keep people from suspecting."

The Joker nodded, expression unreadable as he ran his tongue across the scars inside his mouth.

Mind running twice as fast as the rest of his body, and still at a loss for anything helpful, Jonathan found himself unable to focus on anything apart from how vulnerable his current position left him, how brutal and violent the Joker could be even with his legs immobilized, and all the unspeakable ideas for inflicting pain that floated around in the man's mind.

"You're acting twitchy," the Joker informed him, moving back a bit to better examine his companion's face. "Moreso than usual, I mean."

Jonathan, fearing that he'd blurt out something to give himself away if he even attempted speech, only shrugged. Why was it that when he was actually willing to try the relaxation techniques suggested at Arkham, he was physically incapable of doing them?

Tongue running over the scars again, but this time on the outside, the Joker narrowed his eyes, brows coming together. His expression stayed that way, scrutinizing, for a full thirty seconds or so, until right as Jonathan was on the brink of fainting, he spoke, face returning to his version or normalcy. "Ah. This hasn't been a, uh, good experience for you, has it, Jonny?"

The adrenaline that had been surging through him instantly faded, leaving him almost shivering in its absence. Jonathan attempted to shake his head, only to remember the hands still holding either side of his face. "No." And for once, he was honest. No, being locked up and tagged like an animal had not been a good experience. Neither had being stranded in the house of his enemy while his other half had left him. Or being forced to bond with that enemy just so he wouldn't be completely alone, only to have his alter ego return, outraged, when the friendship began. Or being stuck between everything he'd known about Batman and human interaction in general before his captivity, and what he'd seen of the man once he'd become his prisoner. _Nothing _about this had been a good experience, apart from the food and the library, and even meals without preservatives and Lacan in the original French were enough to turn things around. He'd have tears in his eyes from the stress of everything; if he hadn't rid his body of all the tears it seemed capable of producing by this point.

"Hey, it's okay, kitten," the Joker said, grabbing his shoulders and pulling him into a hug, and even though it _wasn't _okay, wasn't even in the same galaxy cluster as okay, he found himself returning the embrace with everything he had. It didn't matter, all the terrible things that the Joker had done to him, all the things he would do, if he found out. He'd been a source of comfort at some point, and that was enough. Hell, Jonathan could have found comfort in his _great-grandmother's_ arms at this moment.

"Do you wanna leave with me?"

He jolted. He couldn't help it; the most he could do to control his body was to make sure his legs didn't kick his friend's casts. Scarecrow, in spite of his past feelings, was half-shouting _Yes! _in the back of his mind while the rest of him was going cold, and he realized that all his escape attempts and emotional agonies notwithstanding, he did _not _want to leave.

The Joker, thankfully, misinterpreted the movement and held him closer, running one arm up and down his back. "It's all right, Jonny." He sounded almost amused. "I'm not gonna do the meds thing again."

_The meds. _A way out, but he hardly dared to hope. "I—the Batman's got the pills. I don't—I don't know where, and I can't just leave without—"

The hand that had been on his back tapped against his lips. "We could rob a pharmacy."

_Shit._ "But…th—that would take time, and in public…and you're injured. I mean, if the police—"

"Like they've e_ver_ been a problem." The Joker pulled back again, stared. His expression was far from compassionate. "You're hiding something."

"I—no! No, I'm not—"

"You," said the Joker, tightening his hold on Jonathan's arms, keeping him pinned, "don't want to leave."

"It's not that I don't—"

"Now, why would that be, I won_der_?" His tongue shot out, brushing each side of his mouth, and what remained of the lipstick there shined. His hair was tangled, matted, as though he'd been lying down for a very long time and hadn't bothered to brush it out properly. He looked feral, hardly human. "The lack of orderlies? No. The gorgeous architecture? Nooo. And judging by how quick you were to hug, it wasn't the lack of, uh, yours truly, so wha_t _does that leave, hmm?" He stopped, eyes slanting again. Then brightened. "Or is _it _the com—"

"It's _not_!" He couldn't silence himself, despite Scarecrow's shouted warnings, and his own—literal—attempts to bite his tongue. "It's not that, I don't—he isn't—there's nothing between—it isn't what you think!"

"I was _going _to say communication," the Joker said. His grip on Jonathan's arms was now best described as vice-like. "'Cause this place has gotta have high speed and fabulous cell service, and all. What on Earth were you thinking of?"

"I—I—no, it's not like tha—"

One hand moved across his body to pin him down. The other snaked upwards, resting on his throat. "Really?" The humor was gone from the clown, both his voice and body conveying dead seriousness. "Because I think it's ex_act_ly like that."

And he applied pressure.

* * *

Somehow, _somehow_ he had ended up, instead of demanding answers and subsequently exiting, thus maintaining at least a modicum of dignity, sitting on the couch of these maniacs' living room, as Abigail sat beside him holding the cat, Adrian sat on the arm trying to persuade him into letting him look at the injury, and Anika stood directly in front of him, holding a plate of molasses cookies and trying to persuade him to take one.

Well, he knew exactly how the "somehow" had gone: Come sit down or we won't tell you anything. And while he should have—he _did_—know better than that, he got the feeling that no matter how frightening he made himself, they wouldn't be afraid past the initial shock.

It was obvious that all three of them were seriously mentally ill.

"Come on, they're good," Anika protested, shifting her weight from foot to foot as he refused to look at the plate. "It's not poisoned or anything if that's what you're worried about. I'll eat one, if you want. You just point to whichever one you want me to eat. I'll even eat half of yours, so you'll know it's safe."

"Honestly, if you're bleeding under that armor, you're just asking for it to become infected, letting it mix with your perspiration and closing it off from the air like that." He pointed, but didn't try to unlatch the plate as his sister had. "Just let me see. If it's fine, I'll quit asking, and if it's not I can fix it. It's not as if I'm asking you to remove the mask."

Abigail let the quiet baby talk ramble she'd been giving the cat draw to a close—thank _God_, if he'd had to hear one more "Who's the best kitty in the whole wide world?" he might have broken his rule—and gave their new pet an affectionate scratch behind the ears, as it did the sensible thing and cowered. "He's adorable. Where'd you find him?"

"You know that alley outside Mr. Pak's store?" Anika answered, shoving the plate dangerously close to Bruce's face. Wordless, he raised a hand and pushed it back at her, resisting the urge to grab it and throw it toward the nearest wall.

Her sister's face fell. "Somebody didn't _leave_ him there, did they?" She hugged the cat protectively, as if the mere thought of his previous environment would transport him back there.

"No idea," Adrian said. "He was huddled beside the dumpster. Probably trying to hide from the wind. Are you sure you don't want that looked at?"

"Very," he said, through gritted teeth. The cat tensed at his rasped voice.

The man shrugged. "Well, if you're ever in need of medical attention, feel free to stop by."

Bruce felt a vein in his eyelid pulse. "I'll. Keep that. In mind."

"What are you going to call him?" Abigail asked, either oblivious or uncaring to the all the little white, black, and brown hairs the cat was leaving on her blouse. Anika's _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles _T-shirt was similarly affected, whereas Adrian's sweater was untouched. His behavior and speech suggested that he was the sanest member of the trio, though that wasn't saying much.

"I was thinking Batsy," said Anika, as she took a cookie from the plate and tried to place it in Bruce's hand. He clenched his fists, began counting backward from a thousand.

"But he's all colorful."

_Nine hundred ninety-seven, nine hundred ninety-six…_

"Yeah, but look at that little M shape on his forehead. Doesn't it look sorta like the Batsignal?"

_Nine hundred ninety-two, nine hundred ninety-one…_

"Whatever we call him, you're taking him to the vet tomorrow." Adrian stretched, cracked his knuckles. "He's probably got fleas."

"And we've probably already got them, from Jackie."

Abigail snorted.

"Enough." He made his voice as rough and deep as he could, to the point of pain. "Do you have any clue where the Joker's gone, or not?"

"Nope," Anika said brightly, as if this was all okay. "How's Jonathan, by the way?"

He froze.

"What?" She took advantage of his shock to drop the cookie into his suddenly open hand. "It's not like I know who you are or anything. But Jackie said he was living with you, and he wanted to know if Jonathan had been recommitted right after he heard you were hurt. So it doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. You're being nice, right? Because he's a total scaredy-cat. You should be nice."

"He's…" _A nervous wreck. Even more insane than previously thought. Madly in love with me. Thankfully ignorant of my lust for him_. "He's fine."

And then it hit him, like one of Harley Quinn's mallets to the face. _The manor._ _Shit. _The Joker knew he'd been injured…and the Joker was obsessed with him. He could be there now, doing God knows what to Alfred or Jonathan, or the mansion itself. He stood, nearly upending both Anika and Adrian in the process. "I'm leaving."

"Don't be a stranger," Adrian said, in all seriousness.

"And let me know what that fabric is next time," Abigail called, at his retreating back.

"And take care of Jonathan!"

He was halfway home, blazing down the streets and disregarding all rules of the road, as usual, when he realized that Anika's cookie was still in his hand. Against his better judgment—and self dignity—he ended up shoving it into his mouth to keep from biting his lips to the bleeding point.

He refused to admit that it tasted good.

* * *

Jonathan was gone.

He had faded so completely it was like he'd never been there at all. Scarecrow imagined this was how it had felt when he left. Torn apart. Empty. Only now he was the one stranded, unable to speak to, feel, or even sense his other half, trapped with the Joker's hand around his throat, squeezing out his oxygen and consciousness. _Jonathan!_

Nothing, and Scarecrow couldn't say he blamed him. He thrashed, pushed at the Joker's hands to no avail, then kicked, hard, foot colliding with one of the casts. He felt the impact up his leg, and the Joker let go at once, making tortured, muffled vocalizations that he refused to let out. Scarecrow grabbed the headboard, trying to pull himself free before the clown recovered, but the Joker was still on top of him, heavier than he was, and he couldn't get loose—

A hand slapped him across the face, sending sparks across his vision, and the hand was back on his throat, pressing, but not enough to suffocate. Just to cause pain. "You little _bitch._"

"You tried to kill me!" he spat, trying for another kick, but the Joker's legs were on either side of his own, squeezing inwards, and he couldn't move.

"You're trying to steal _my _man."

"He's not yours!"

Another slap, and the hand tightened. "What did you just say to me?"

"He's _not_ yours." It was suicidal. Scarecrow didn't even _want _him, but he couldn't stop. "He's never yours and he _never _will be. He doesn't love you, he doesn't want you, and you're _delusional_ if you think otherwise. What Jonathan feels about Bruce Wayne is not something you can—"

"Bruce Wayne?" The Joker let go of his throat, propping himself up with his elbows on Scarecrow's chest. He sucked on the scars from the inside, contemplating. "Huh. Bruce Wayne."


	77. The Deal

AN: Don't expect an update for at least three days, guys. Midterms. Fun.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Saved by a distinction, of all things. Scarecrow would have rolled his eyes if he was foolish enough to risk it. Rather, he focused his energy on ignoring the pain from the choking and slaps, and trying to regain as much oxygen as he could with the Joker still lying on top of him. He considered calling out to his other half, to see if Jonathan would reopen the link—see if he was even _aware_ of the world outside at the moment—but he had to stay alert. The mention of Bruce Wayne had saved him for now, but he had no reason to believe that the Joker wouldn't decide that was just as bad, or choose to punish him for kicking the cast, or inflict pain again for no other reason besides his own enjoyment.

He'd never been able to figure out why Jonathan considered the clown a friend.

It was only by sheer luck that he hadn't been strangled. Scarecrow wasn't entirely sure _why _he'd said Bruce Wayne, even. Giving the Batman such an ordinary name made him sound human, as if he was a person with logical motivations and emotions and everything else that normal people had. As far as Scarecrow was concerned, the Bat was a sadist, more demon than human, and existed only to ruin their plans and try to steal and corrupt his Jonathan. He didn't deserve a human name.

Then again, he had been thinking about how Jonathan viewed the Batman before they'd discovered the clown, between trying to persuade his alter ego to see the Bat for the monster he was. Jonathan still referred to his jailer as "Batman," but it was obvious even to the half without psychiatric training that he was seeing the Bruce Wayne façade more and more. Which was without a doubt what the Bat had intended, with the trips outside and the internet videos and everything else.

Jonathan ought to recognize what was going on. He'd been able to make his patients trust him, to the point where some of them wouldn't put up a fight when he tested the compounds on them for a _second _time. Not that they weren't horrified and crying—and how much fun that had been—but they hadn't tried to run or struggle either. And yet Jonathan, for all that insight, couldn't tell when the _exact same thing_ was being done to him. Superior intellect didn't always mean superior understanding, it would seem.

Whatever. For once, the distinction between the two worked in his favor, and he wasn't about to risk letting the wrong name slip by dwelling on it now.

"So." The Joker leaned forward, either unnoticing or uncaring that the shift in weight nearly suffocated Scarecrow again. "Jonny's got a crush on Bruce Wayne? Brucey, and not _my _Batsy?"

He nodded, not wanting to lose any more air by speaking.

There was a gleam in the Joker's eyes that was by no means well-intentioned, and the only thing that kept Scarecrow from shivering was the fact that he'd been effectively immobilized. "You sure about that, 'Crow?"

His heartbeat quickened, which hardly helped the asphyxiation problem. Another nod, and for a tense, seemingly endless moment, the Joker continued to stare, analyzing until Scarecrow's lungs were burning, vision darkening. And then he shrugged and rolled to the side to lay beside him, leaving his companion to gasp for air. Scarecrow felt the man's hand close around his wrist before he could recover enough to stand up, tight. "What about you?"

"What?" he managed. He could feel the bruises forming on his throat, and it wouldn't surprise him if a few ribs were cracked.

"Which one do_ you_ like?"

"Neither." Scarecrow massaged his throat with his free hand, wondering how he was going to hide this, before his own mind turned against him by assaulting him with all the filthy thoughts he'd had about the Bat in the past several days, at once. _Even my subconscious wants me dead. That's encouraging._

The Joker, of course, noted the sudden rush of blood to Scarecrow's face. "Ah. Lemme rephrase: which one do you want to, uh, ravish you? The gentle, caring—boring—playboy, or the dangerous man in the mask?"

"As if," said Scarecrow, desperately struggling to keep his face impassive, "I'd want to have sex with a man wearing spiked gauntlets."

The Joker licked his lips, drawing out the action longer than his usual swipes. "Who _wouldn't _want that?"

"Me."

The hold on his wrist slackened. "And that's why you're a failure. No offense."

"Things are hellish enough without you adding onto it." If the Joker hadn't killed him for the lust and affection, he doubted he'd be killed for talking back. That was his hope, anyway. At this point, he was past restraining himself.

"Then why haven't you left?" The Joker raised the hand he held to the level of their shoulder, running the fingers of his own hand over Scarecrow's cut-up skin. "Unless this is your way of in_dul_ging your masochistic tendencies."

Teeth gritted, Scarecrow grabbed his pant leg and pulled it up, exposing the GPS still strapped to his ankle. "That's why. I don't suppose you'd be so kind as to remove it?" He had to have knives about his person, and knowing him, upwards of a dozen. Absconding with the Joker as the best option. Scarecrow couldn't believe he'd sunk so low. Jonathan would be upset, but that would fade, eventually. And it was to protect him.

"Well, yeah." The Joker made no move to produce a weapon, sucking on the scars again. "But I thin_k_ it'd be better for you two to stay."

"You son of a bitch." Salvation, as usual, was so close he could almost reach out and touch it, held just out of his grasp by a sadist who seemed to delight in nothing more than taunting him with it. He was reminded of Jonathan's childhood, in which his other half was forced to perform hard labor each day by his great-grandmother, who would sit there and watch. While drinking lemonade.

God, it had been satisfying to watch that bitch die.

"Watch it." But the humor in his voice showed no signs of fading. If nothing else, Scarecrow had that going for him. "Where's Jonny?"

"What?" Why was it that any conversation with the clown made him feel as if he was stuck at a crossroads with cars speeding by, and no idea which path to take?

"Jon. A. Than." The Joker enunciated it as if he was speaking to an idiot, which did nothing to temper Scarecrow's mood. "Where's he at? He's listening, right?"

The link was still closed, and the sensation of Jonathan's presence gone. He hadn't closed himself off like this since he was hiding from the madness last February. Scarecrow couldn't remember when he'd last done it before that. _Jonathan?_

Nothing. Jonathan couldn't even hear him, not at this level, when he disappeared so completely. He could bring his other half out of it, but that would involve going deeper inside, and the last thing he wanted was to lose awareness while the Clown Prince of Crime was lying there. Especially given that he'd already tried to kill him once. "No. He's not."

The Joker raised a brow, showing genuine, undiluted interest for the first time since Scarecrow had mentioned Bruce Wayne. "How long have you been able to do that?"

"Since he was three. What's your point?"

"My poin_t _is that you aren't happy, are you?" He tapped Scarecrow's nose, either to emphasize his point or to be annoying, and whichever way it was, Scarecrow gave serious thought to biting his hand. He would have, self preservation be damned, if the Joker hadn't withdrawn as quickly as he did. "Nope. Your frown remains firmly, uh, right side up."

He didn't try to decipher the statement's meaning. "Your insight is stunning. Tell me, did you figure that out from my expressions alone, or did the part where I asked you to get me out of here tip you off?"

The Joker smiled. It was one of his genuine smiles, and that made it all the more maddening. "How long's it been since I told you that sarcasm's a crutch for ins_ec_urities?"

"You said that to Jonathan." _Is there a point to this? _There had better be. Winded or not, if this rambling mess of a conversation was just another false hope, Scarecrow would find a way to kill him. Assuming he could die. At some times, like these, the bastard seemed more demon than human.

"Same difference."

Vaguely aware that all the grinding he'd been doing lately was going to start wearing away at his tooth enamel, Scarecrow switched to biting his tongue. He _hated _it when the difference between them was disregarded. Even when he didn't want anyone to be able to tell, as with the Batman. They were s_eparate._ He was his own being, even if he had no physical form, and he was _not _an imaginary friend to be disregarded. Never again would he be pushed back to that. "Say what you want to say. Now."

"Testy today, aren't we?" The Joker smirked. "Captivity doesn't suit you."

"I've noticed."

"My point is, it's Brucey's fault you're unhappy, isn't it? He's the one keeping you locked up, getting Jonny all starry-eyed and you all hot and bo_there_d. So," and here he leaned in, eyes sparkling, "how'd you like to make him suffer?"

Against his better judgment, he was drawn like a moth to the flame. Escape, he knew, should have been the priority, but revenge on the Batman…it was _his _fault Jonathan was suffering, his fault Scarecrow felt their connection loosening, and his fault Scarecrow was having these dreams. "What have you got in mind?"

The Joker dragged himself upwards to sit against the headboard, running a hand through his hair. "How does Brucey act around you? You think he, uh, returns the affections?"

Scarecrow made a noise between a snort and a gag. "Hardly. He never leaves him alone, but that's out of guilt and a need for control, not fondness. And aside from the attempts to gain Jonathan's trust, we disgust him. He won't even look at us."

There was a smile on the Joker's face, an amused one, and he placed a hand over his face to hide it, something Scarecrow had never seen him do.

"What?"

"Nothing. Scarecrow." He lowered his hand, cleared his throat. "You know better than anyone how to break a person. An emotional loss, or a personal failure. That would do it, right?"

"Possibly." He sat up as well, careful to keep his distance. "If the mind's already weakened…and B—Bruce has suffered enough losses, failures to protect the city from you, and all the rest of us."

If the Joker had caught the stutter, he didn't show it. "And his girlie died…he's not all that open or, uh, trusting anyway." He paused, smacked his lips. "Yeah. It'll work."

"_What_?" Calm. He had to stay calm. He wanted to break the Batman every bit as much as he wanted to escape, and probably more. And if he became too agitated, Jonathan might sense it and return. Jonathan wouldn't want to make the Bat suffer. "What are you talking about?"

"Jonny wants Brucey, doesn't he? Wants a big strong knight in shining armor to keep him safe and scare off all the bad things?" The Joker didn't wait for the assent that Scarecrow couldn't bring himself to give. "So, let your better half have 'im."

"_What_?!" Screw calmness. "You—you want me to sit back and—"

There was a hand clad in purple leather over his mouth, another on the back of his head to keep him still enough for the first hand to be of any use. "Re_lax_, princess. _Breathe. _Put the straw in your head for good use to once and think about it. Can you honestly picture _that _pairing coming up roses?"

_No, because it's going to _break _Jonathan. Again._ He shook his head vehemently, to compensate for the forced silence.

"Exactly. Especially with _you _functioning as Jonny's own personal raincloud. But Brucey's got a saving people thing. He's gonna want it to work. More than that, he's gonna _need _it to work, 'cause he can't save the city so often, and he couldn't save his lady-friend, but he _has _to be able to save the poor defenseless mental patient under his constant protection and _affect_ion. And, unlike Jonny, who's got you to pick up the pieces, Brucey doesn't have anybody."

"His butler."

"Not the same. You understand Jonny on a level that nobody else could get _close _to. The butler isn't Wayne's other half, Batman is, and neither of 'em are gonna get the need for this relationship to work. Not fully, anyway. Where as you get a kitten who's closer to you than ever, and your stupid sexy tormenter shattered on top of it. Whaddya think?"

"I think that Bruce Wayne doesn't return those feelings."

A smirk. "Trust me on this. He will."

"And what do you get out of this?"

"Me? I get to show up when Bruce is all fragile and broken." The Joker looked giddy at the thought, his body seeming to radiate with glee. "And I get to shatter the rest of the pieces, and help clear 'em away so nobody's left but my Batman."

Scarecrow was of the opinion that breaking Bruce Wayne would either destroy him all together, or push him over the edge, remove the restraints his more human qualities held. But he didn't care. As long as they were far away, and he got to hurt the Bat, it would be worth it. But at the same time…"That would hurt Jonathan."

The Joker was patting his shoulder, suddenly, and despite himself, he appreciated the gesture. Stupid lingering desires. "And letting Brucey hurt him first wouldn't?"

"Bruce—"

"Is already gaining his trust, you said. Think about it. He poisoned Jonathan, locked 'im up. What good can come out of letting this, uh, crush continue? At least this way you can keep 'im from ever really trusting, and you'll be there for him every step of the way instead of bickering. Don't you want to keep him safe?"

It was justification and he knew it. But the alternative…letting Jonathan trust the Joker had nearly killed him. And the Batman was _worse._ The justification; yes, it disgusted him, but still. He swallowed hard, felt himself nod.

The Joker hugged him, which did nothing to settle his growing nausea. "Can I see Jonny?"

"You're going to hurt him."

"No." He looked serious, for whatever that was worth. "Just to talk. I'll leave sowing the seeds of dis_con_tent to you. Mostly. I'm leaving. I just wanna say bye."

Scarecrow nodded again, closing his eyes. He felt the mattress shift beside him as he slipped deep inside his mind, to the darkest recesses where Jonathan lurked, hidden. He reassured his other without speaking—_It's all right, he won't hurt you, come out, just call Batman Bruce Wayne—_hating himself for it, but not enough to stop.

Jonathan opened his eyes, shaking slightly, to find the Joker leaning against the wall, crutches beside him, searching through one of the boxes that held clothing. "Doesn't trust you with hangers, does he?" He grabbed a shirt, threw it at the bed. "Here. Put that on, angel."

"Why?"

"Because it's a turtleneck. It'll hide the bruises." The Joker put his weight on the crutches, making a slow and apparently agonizing trek back to the bed. "If Brucey sees those, he'll either think you're crazy—uh, crazier—or hiding things from him. And I don't wanna cause any, uh, trouble in paradise."

Grateful that he wasn't being choked again, Jonathan nodded, stripped off his current shirt and replaced it. "You're not angry?"

"No. I don't care what you get up to with Bruce Wayne, as long as you stay _away_ from Batsy." He reached the mattress and moved past it, hobbling toward the window. "Got it?"

"Y—yes." He made a note to thank Scarecrow for making the excuse that had saved them. "You're leaving?"

"Any longer and I'd be asking to be caught. Kitten?" He motioned Jonathan to stand as he pulled up the window shade, rapped on the glass three times.

"Yes?" He closed the space between them, only to be enveloped in a hug.

"I think Brucey likes you. I really do. Take a chance; he wouldn't hurt you." There were dark outlines of people outside, and the Joker pulled away, leaning on the frame as he opened the window. "We'll replace the bars so they don't suspect. Good luck."

"Thanks." The Joker was being helped outside in a matter of seconds. "You too."

"Bye, angel."

"Good bye." And then he was gone, leaving Jonathan alone with a swirling storm of confused thoughts, as Scarecrow had fallen silent. He just managed to turn off the lights and lie down under the blankets, maybe three minutes later, willing sleep to come, as the door flew open and Batman stood in the doorway, still in the suit, but with the cowl off. He looked panicked, and was clutching his side.

"Jonathan?"

He tried to look bewildered, as though he'd just awoken from sleep. "What's wrong? Are you hurt?"

The Bat looked around the room, some of the tension going from his shoulders. "I—no, I'm fine, just—nothing. Has anyone…come in?"

"No. What's going on?"

"Never mind. Just…find me if you hear or see anything, all right?"

Jonathan was grateful for the dark concealing his features. It made the lies easier. The mention of seeing things reminded him. "I—Batman?"

"Yes?" He looked distracted, pained. He must have torn the stitches, but he was walking well enough…it couldn't be severe.

"The pills?"

Batman sighed, ran a hand through his hair. "I—I'll get them. I'll be back in a minute, okay?"

"Okay. Thank you." He watched the man turn to the door, and added, before he could think about it, "I…thank you. Bruce."

* * *

AN: "Frown upside-down" means smile, so a frown right-side up is, well, a frown.


	78. Closeness

AN: Gah, sorry about the delay. Midterms very nearly killed me, and then I got some greatly needed relaxation by taking a night off for the dorm's Halloween party yesterday. I came in second in the costume contest by one vote (though they never officially announced second and third, for some reason), and as fate would have it, there were two Jokers, a Riddler, a Scarecrow, and a Penguin there. You can see the group here: i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ batvillains. jpg

Good times.

Thanks for the reviews, and sorry I'm so belated in the replies!

_

* * *

_

Scarecrow?

He knew before he called that Scarecrow was asleep. The mental silence when one of them was unconscious was different than ordinary quiet, though it wasn't the sensation of total absence he'd felt when Scarecrow had left. It was more like the barrier they sensed when the link between them was closed; the presence was still there, but buried just below the surface. Like that, but the divide was thinner in sleep, less deliberate. Easily cleared, sometimes by something as simple as calling out.

Not this time. Scarecrow stayed asleep. Lightly asleep—the deeper his other half's sleep, the harder it was to function himself—but still unconscious.

Jonathan sat up, suppressing a yawn, and glanced around the room. The box that contained the shirts was open. _Was it open last night? _No clue. With a flash of remembrance—his mind wasn't working as fast as it should, unsurprising, since half of it was asleep—he glanced down at himself, pulling back the sheets to better view his clothing. The jeans and socks he'd been too tired to take off, and the shirt. Dark gray, long-sleeved, and turtle-necked. The one the Joker had handed to him, last night.

If he _had_ handed it to him.

_The cameras. _His eyes tracked from wall to wall, as if the surveillance in the room was visible. _They wouldn't have stopped watching. _True, he was about as threatening as a garden snake at this point, but this was Batman's mansion. The man hadn't lived this long by being careless. And the Joker couldn't have waltzed in without being recorded. Even if no one had been observing the video feed at the time, they must have checked in the hours he'd been sleeping.

And there was no way they'd let him sleep through that discovery.

Maybe it had been a dream. A particularly vivid dream. Certainly, the Joker telling him to pursue Bruce Wayne was completely illogical, even for the Clown Prince of Crime.

Or maybe he'd finally snapped and imagined the whole thing.

_No. _Jonathan swallowed, hard, and felt a sudden pain in his throat as he did, as if he'd somehow injured himself with the action. _Or aggravated a previous injury_. He pulled down the neck of the shirt, feeling the skin beneath. It was sore, bruised. Because he'd been choked. Relief washed over him, along with a wry amusement at the fact that the realization that he _had _been strangled was a source of respite.

_Unless you did that to yourself._

And just like that, the calm dissipated. No. No, he had _not _choked himself. He _hadn't._ The Joker had been here, somehow escaped detection, and then gave him advice that went against the clown's character entirely. He _must _have. Jonathan pushed the covers to side, and, ignoring the fatigue from his other half, stood, almost running into the bathroom.

There was no mirror, as always, but the water in the toilet bowl reflected surprising well, with little distortion. The bruises in the reflection took the shape of a hand across the throat, the fingers and thumbs making up the darkest areas, imprinted deeply enough that they nearly made a perfect outline. An outline that was bigger than his own hand. Jonathan leaned against the sink, inhaled slowly in spite of the pain. He hadn't lost it, then. _So what about the cameras?_

He felt his other half stir. _Scarecrow?_

_Eh?_

_Do you think the Joker found the security cameras?_

_Huh? _He wasn't sure if his alter ego's confusion was based on just waking up, or if he'd forgotten the cameras altogether. Come to think of it, Jonathan hadn't given them much thought either, to the point where he'd allowed Scarecrow to lie on the bed pleasuring himself, almost certainly in full view of the surveillance, without giving it a second thought.

_Oh, fantastic. _His cheeks flamed at the epiphany of unwitting exhibitionism. So Batman likely knew about the masturbating to him thing. Well, that would explain the disgust. _Fuck._

_Stop swearing and tell me what's going on._

_The security cameras. How did Batman or the butler not notice the Joker's presence and either capture him or come in here demanding to know where he'd gone?_

The pause in response told him that Scarecrow had realized the unwitting exhibitionism as well. _No idea._

Face still burning, Jonathan turned his head, unable to face his reflection. His eyes fell first on the tiled wall, then moved to the roll of toilet paper. And the writing on it.

"don't freaK, I've goT ThE camera situatioN HAndled." In pencil. Almost too lightly to be seen. How…convenient. _Scarecrow?_

_Yes, I see it too. You're not insane._

Jonathan tore the square of paper from the roll, flushed it. Wasn't insane _yet_, anyway. He would be if he continued to consider when the Joker had dragged himself into the bathroom to write the message, or why he was encouraging Jonathan to pursue the affections of Bruce Wayne. He didn't so much as attempt to figure out how the Joker or his men had tampered with the video feed. His specialty was psychopharmacology, not technology, and he had the feeling his mind would shatter trying to work it out. _Why is he encouraging me to profess my love?_

_Because he's psychotic and bored?_

Shrugging, Jonathan realized he was unable to come up with a better explanation. He'd learned by now that the Joker never did things for anyone's benefit but his own, and that following his advice usually led to suffering on Jonathan's part. Best to ignore him.

Besides, Batman was disgusted by him. It didn't matter how much Jonathan wished he would return those feelings—not that he did, he knew well enough that it was asking for trouble—because he never would. He needed to accept that, as Scarecrow seemed to have accepted that his lust would never be sated, and move on.

* * *

Batman was having breakfast in the kitchen.

Well, this day just got better and better.

Adjusting the neckline of the shirt to make sure the bruises were hidden, Jonathan walked to the nearest cabinet and began looking through it without actually seeing any of the items within. _Don't think about the masturbating, _he instructed himself to no discernable effect, feeling his face go scarlet and unable to stop it. Maybe the Bat hadn't noticed. Luck had to favor everyone once in a while, after all, even criminals.

"Do you eat flour?"

"What?" He started to turn his head toward the table, remembered how flushed he was, and snapped back, seeing the cabinet he'd been rifling through for the first time. Flour. Baking soda. Sugar. Other baking supplies. Ah. So much for being inconspicuous.

"Because you eat cake mix," Batman clarified. Since he wasn't actually looking at him, Jonathan had no idea where the Bat's eyes were, but he swore he could feel them boring into his back, logical or not. "And that's flour, among other things. I wasn't sure if you ate it straight."

"I don't," he said, though it struck him as something worth trying. "I was looking for the oatmeal."

"Next cabinet over."

"Oh."

"You haven't seen Alfred, have you?"

Satisfied that at least some of the blood had drained from his face, Jonathan turned to face the table. He didn't make eye contact, glancing instead at Batman's hands and, after realizing that was just as bad, his plate. It was three-fourths empty, the gravy on the last bit covering whatever else was there, if there was anything. "No."

Batman nodded, pushing his fork in what remained on the plate, but making no effort to raise it toward his mouth. His face remained impassive enough to be unreadable, but his body movements—the subtle shifts in posture, aimless scraping of the fork, and the way one of his legs was ceaselessly bobbing up and down—all suggested that he was uneasy. It was the way Jonathan's patients had looked, during the first sessions before the toxin, when they sensed something was amiss but had no idea what. It was the way _he _looked, every time he was brought back to Arkham and had to deal with being examined by the nurses before he was allowed back into the cells. They had a habit of giggling at him that he'd like to poison them for.

From what he'd observed of the Bat and his butler, they were close. They'd have to be, for the man to put up with all this Caped Crusader nonsense. Terrifying as the butler was, he was—from what Jonathan had seen—as sane as anyone involved in this madness could be, and he wasn't the type to be blackmail. It was either closeness or duty, and it seemed like closeness. So Batman must have angered him in some way, or upset him, and was afraid of the repercussions.

Jonathan thought back to the night prior, the Bat's appearance in the doorway, winded, worried, and wounded—and in the suit. Going out before he had time to heal. Jonathan hadn't thought of it as serious at the time, but Batman was strong enough to mask pain. And he'd lost so much blood already. _He could have killed himself._

_Good._

He ignored that. "Are you all right?" It came out sharper than he'd intended, somewhere between frightened and scolding. Great. As if a man who was disgusted by his attraction—or possibly his very existence—needed more reminders of the unwanted affection directed toward him.

Batman looked more taken aback than repulsed, at least. "What?"

"You…last night, you looked hurt." He let his gaze drop to a chair on the other side of the table, the one the farthest diagonally from the Bat's. It was where he usually sat, and he had the idea that this conversation would be slightly less awkward if he was seated as opposed to slouching beside the refrigerator, but he couldn't bring himself to move for fear of alienating the man further. "I wasn't sure if it was serious."

"It wasn't." Jonathan risked glancing up and found that Batman wasn't looking at him. Instead, he was very focused on his plate, face tinged pink. He couldn't tell if the man was ill at ease with the situation at hand or his prior recklessness. Hopefully it was the latter. Anyway, he_ deserved _to feel guilty, after the worry he'd put Jonathan through. It had only been for a few seconds, to be fair, but those few seconds were enough. If his heart was any weaker, that would have made it give out. "I just…overexerted myself. It was stupid."

_Yes, it was._

_What does he do that isn't?_

Jonathan brushed that comment aside as well, pulled on the hems of his sleeves. His composure had once been so impeccable. Had the toxin removed that, or the Joker? It wasn't worth pondering now, he supposed, and it wasn't wise to let the conversation trail off on his concern, to further discomfort the Bat. "Did you find him?"

"Who?" Batman looked up, as Jonathan moved his gaze just enough to avoid eye contact.

"The Joker. Because you were hurt, and last night you seemed worried about someone in the manor. Did you find him and lose him?" He couldn't have, because the Joker couldn't have disabled the security system, slipped inside, rigged the cameras, written a message, and talked with Jonathan all before the Bat could catch up, but he'd been worried about an intruder, and the Joker, Jonathan supposed, was the logical conclusion to jump to.

"No." And Batman's face became all the redder. "I found his friends."

It took Jonathan a moment to realize that he meant the siblings, and a moment longer to imagine them doing harm to anyone. Not that they couldn't—Abigail had told him a story that involved herself beating a man's brains out when they'd first spoken—but he couldn't imagine three untrained twenty-somethings doing any damage to someone with Batman's skill. "And they hurt you?"

He scoffed, clutching his side a moment after he did it. "No. I just…overexerted myself. Getting into the apartment." His face was flushed again.

Jonathan didn't question it.

"They're spirited." The way he said it indicated that he was searching for a polite way of saying "absolutely mad."

Jonathan thought back to his own encounters with the family, and held a hand to his mouth to cover a smile. "What did they do, show you the Joker doll?"

"No, the Ba—she's got a Joker too?"

With a nod, he risked moving toward the chair. The Bat didn't react. "She has one for everyone. They were making mine when I was there."

Batman shook his head, brows furrowed, but mouth twitch as if he was about to laugh. "Did they give you cookies?"

He clamped his hand firmly over his mouth to stifle giggles. "They gave _you _cookies? You _took _them?"

"Not willingly." He was smiling now, genuinely.

It occurred to Jonathan that he was having a _conversation _with the Batman. Not forced, not to gain favors or information. An actual, friendly conversation, the likes of which they hadn't had since the night they watched Bond films, and that had been less of a conversation and more of Jonathan ranting at the screen. This…this was different. Mutual. _I thought he couldn't stand the sight of me?_

And it wasn't just the Bat. He was _answering, _enjoying himself. He'd never been good at this, even before he became an outlaw. And yet it seemed so natural. _What the hell?_

"Jonathan?"

"Huh?"

"Are you all right?" His brows were raised now, mouth pursed with concern that Scarecrow insisted was false, though Jonathan couldn't be sure. "I know you hate being asked that, but you zoned out."

"No, I'm fine—I—" he paused, mind racing for any excuse. "I just—remembered. I need the meds."

"Oh." Batman reached into his pocket, pulled out the prescription bottle. "Here. Take them." He didn't, as Jonathan had expected, open it, shake out two tablets, and hand them over. Instead, he gave him the entire bottle.

Jonathan stared. "Are you—"

"But tell me when you run out this time, all right?"

Dumbstruck, he nodded, trying to stammer out a thank you but finding that his vocal cords didn't seem to be functioning. He felt a rush of emotions: anger and incredulity that the Bat hadn't seen through the Joker's lie, confusion at the sudden change of policy, and more than all, gratitude. _He gave me the meds back. _Obvious, but all his mind could produce.

_He probably didn't want the responsibility anymore._

That wasn't it. He didn't know _what _it was, brain still churning, trying to determine what had brought the change of heart, but Jonathan was sure it wasn't that. The emotion seemed genuine, whatever the emotion was, and not an excuse to shirk a duty. "Bruce—"

And then the butler was in the kitchen, his eyes on Batman, and the light in them far from good-humored. "Master Wayne—"

"We need to talk," he finished, legs of his chair scraping on the floor as he stood.


	79. Admonishment

AN: Happy Halloween, everybody! Sorry for the shortness of this particular chapter, but I hope to have more written tomorrow (though my friends are drawing me into their game of Dungeons and Dragons, so we'll see how that goes. I'm a wizard!) And tonight I'm off to _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_—as Harley Quinn—which will be awesome. Anyway, have a happy holiday!

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bruce had hated the manor for years after his parents' murder.

It was cold after that night, and dark; what had once seemed open and inviting became empty and hostile, as if the life of the mansion itself had disappeared with his mother and father. There had been good times, admittedly, after his parents were killed, times when the mood lightened and things came so close to being normal again, but those times were few and far between the bad moments, or the indifferent ones. Indifference, along with anger, had been his greatest emotion in the years after, when nothing had mattered to him. Not his education, or friends, or future. It had become meaningless after his mother and father were gone, and the mansion seemed more of a tomb than the plot his parents were buried in.

It was only when he returned after his seven year absence that the manor had begun to feel like home again. Bruce wasn't sure if that was because he was finally in step with his parents' ideals, rather than lost in his own suffering, or simply because he'd returned to the place where he was raised after Ra's al Ghul's betrayal. He'd never bothered to question it. He finally had a purpose in life, something to strive for, and that wasn't something he cared to analyze.

But whatever the reason, it was astonishing how much of that dark, uninviting atmosphere instantly reappeared when he stepped into the hallway to be confronted by Alfred. It was a testament to the butler's skill in the art of intimidation, certainly.

He just wished it wasn't directed at him.

Slowly, he raised his head and forced himself to make eye contact. Ridiculous in theory—he was a grown man, after all, and _the Batman _besides—but Alfred had always had the knack for making him feel like a disobedient five year old with a single glance or word. As if his guilt hadn't been gut-wrenching enough before.

"What were you thinking, Master Wayne?" He didn't even say it angrily, which made it all the worse.

Bruce knew, before he opened his mouth, that whatever argument he offered was going to sound idiotic the moment he expressed it aloud, no matter how logical it was to him, or had been at the time. Such was the danger of angering Alfred. "Vicki Vale, she—the apartment she went to, after I'd been stabbed—the people living there were the ones who'd helped the Joker, after he broke his legs. I was looking for information."

"And you couldn't have shared that knowledge with the Commissioner and had him question them? You'd have received the information—which, judging by your arrival home relatively early last night, and the lack of a report on the Joker's capture and subsequent arrest in the news this morning, was useless—either way, and you wouldn't have torn the stitches again."

"They didn't _tear_," he protested, deciding it best not to mention the promise with Jonathan not to hurt his friends. He doubted Alfred would take kindly to that information, and besides, there was no reason to, as contacting the Commissioner had never crossed his mind. "And I didn't think to—"

"That much is obvious."

He clenched his teeth. _He's worried for your safety. It's not a personal attack on your career choices, just a difference in priorities. _Didn't make it any better. "Alfred, I'm all right—"

"_This _time, sir. That won't work as an excuse forever."

Bruce had no argument against that, knowing, much as he'd love to deny it, and easy as it was to forget when protected by Kevlar, that he was as vulnerable as anyone. Trained, yes, but that training couldn't stand against time. Or stupid mistakes, which he seemed to be making in spades as of late. "I know. I'm sorry."

Not that sorry changed his actions, as Alfred's lack of change in posture or expression told him. "Do you recall when I told you that you were losing yourself to this monster, Master Wayne?"

Always, much as he wished he could erase the thought nagging at the back of his mind. Even though it was necessary. "Yes."

"That's bad enough without you losing your _life_ to it as well."

Only Alfred could make concern sound so admonishing. "I didn't mean to worry you. Honestly. I won't go out again until I remove the stitches, all right? I'll be more careful."

"For your sake, I hope so."

* * *

There was no shouting, from the hallway. Jonathan wasn't sure why he'd expected any. He'd never heard the butler yell, even when he'd tried to escape, or when Batman had almost bled to death. Perhaps it was his great-grandmother's influence that made him associate discipline and the elderly with screaming. Though she'd been just as terrifying when she was speaking quietly, or not speaking at all, seeming hardly human at times. More like the embodiment of the devil she was so fond of telling her great-grandson he'd be going to when he died, if he didn't do exactly as she said. _Do you think he's all right?_

_If the butler's willing to put up with all the Bat-shit, then I'm sure he'll get over this._

Scarecrow, unless he was imagining it, seemed slightly less disgusted than usual. Maybe he'd run out of steam. Or maybe—unlikely as he knew it was, and that was _highly _unlikely—he was starting to come around to the Bat. Jonathan still couldn't shake the Joker's words regarding his feelings to Batman. Or Bruce Wayne, as his other half had instructed him to say around the clown. Given the change from the choking to the calm he'd encountered upon returning to the outside world, he imagined it was the distinction that must have saved his life.

Yet he couldn't bring himself to make it, mentally. Bruce Wayne was still Batman. The divide wasn't clear-cut, as his relationship was with Scarecrow. They weren't the same person while being separate, just the same altogether. Which made the love for him every bit as confusing as it was mortifying. He ought to hate him, for destroying his reputation, his career. His mind. Part of him was still angry, for the suffering the man had put him through, and he wasn't sure he'd ever forgive that, but part of him felt that the kindness after it all almost atoned for it.

And those parts combined about as well as oil and water. It might have been for the better, after all, that Batman couldn't stand him. Assuming that he couldn't. Jonathan still didn't know what to make of the conversation moments ago. _Scarecrow?_

_Yeah?_

_Do you think the Joker was right? About Batman liking me back?_

Scarecrow responded with a faint and deliberate gagging sound. _Please tell me you're not thinking of testing that._

As if he was going to grab the Batman and profess his love. Even he, for all his stupid mistakes as of late, wasn't that idiotic.

The Bat walked back into the kitchen before he had the chance to respond. Jonathan could read his expression well enough, for once, to tell that he was unhappy. Not that his mood wasn't obvious when context was taken into account, but at least he'd gotten somewhat better and understanding the man. Which was a good thing. Probably.

"Are you all right?"

Batman stopped, halfway in the act of lifting his plate from the table. Jonathan realized he hadn't intended to sit back down, and felt a sudden and sharp sense of disappointment. "Are you?"

"What?"

"You look upset. What's wrong?"

Jonathan couldn't tell if he was honestly concerned, or if he was trying to change the subject. Either was likely, but he hoped it was the first. It would have disgusted him a few weeks ago. He wasn't sure when all that had changed. It must have been a process, too slow for him to notice the shifts until they'd already occurred. "Nothing." _Aside from the fact that I have a wild crush that you'd have to be blind not to have noticed, I just realized you probably know that I've been masturbating to you, and I can't for the life of me figure out if you hate me or actually like me back._

_For the love of God, don't tell him that._

"Nothing, just. You gave me back the meds."

Batman nodded, carrying the plate to the sink. "I didn't think you'd enjoy going back to the hallucinations any more than I would."

_So it's all about his suffering. How typical._

He trusted him. Jonathan was torn between being ecstatic and being bewildered to the point of tears. "That's—thank you. Bruce." It was the third time he'd said the name, and that didn't make it any easier. It was just a name—he'd answer to Scarecrow as easily as Jonathan, at least when speaking to those who didn't know the difference—but it felt odd, somehow. Not wrong, exactly, but like trying to use a nickname for someone who'd gone by the proper name for the entirety of their relationship.

"You're welcome." He nodded, turned on the water to rinse the dish. "It's not an easy thing for you, is it?"

Jonathan stopped in the process of opening his mouth to ask what his companion was talking about, realizing that he understood, for once. Batman was referring to the same thing he'd been thinking of, the use of the first name. The familiarity of it, combined with the incongruity to his mental image of the man. "No."

Batman—Bruce—Batman didn't speak, shutting off the tap, but he did nod a second time.

"Was it hard for you? Using my name?"

He shrugged. It seemed so long ago now, from the first time he'd heard the Bat say "Jonathan." "I didn't think about it at the time, really. It was the only thing I could get you to respond to."

_Except, of course, for your actual title. But he wouldn't bring himself to give you respect, would he?_

That was how he'd felt, when Batman had first used his name. But it was familiar now, natural. He couldn't remember when that had happened either. It was almost like slipping into madness again, losing his grip on what had happened and when. But this loss didn't come with the panic, the worry so powerful he was always on the verge of being sick. This…it wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't unpleasant either. "Oh."

"How—" Batman stopped, bit his lip gently, eyes moving with thought. He looked apprehensive, slightly, if Jonathan was reading him correctly. "How does Scarecrow feel about it?"

_He can go fuck himself. Please, tell him that._

"He doesn't want to talk to you." It occurred to Jonathan—immediately accompanied by another flare of heat on his cheeks—that he was speaking like a small child with an imaginary friend, or someone caught between two people giving each other the silent treatment. Just when he thought he couldn't lose any more dignity.

The Bat, for once, had the tact not to press the issue. "Okay. Did you want me to get you anything?"

Glancing down at the empty space of table in front of him, Jonathan realized he'd forgotten to get breakfast. "Uh, no, I'll get something myself."

Batman opened the dishwasher, set the plate inside. He closed it as he straightened, and turned toward the door. "Right. Well, I promised Alfred I wouldn't strain myself anymore, so if you need something, I'll be in my room—"

Jonathan wasn't sure when he'd gotten out of his chair, let alone moved to the other side of the breakfast table. He must have moved quickly, and Scarecrow hadn't taken over, because he would have felt that, but he wasn't aware of what he was doing at all, acting on pure reflex, and only noticed his actions when his hand closed on the Bat's sleeve, and Batman turned back to face him. "Jonathan?"

"Er." Wonderful. He'd finally lost it. Just a matter of time, he supposed, but he hadn't realized that all it would take was a man walking out of a door to push him over the edge. "I. Can we talk?"


	80. More Than Talking

AN: This morning, my friend informed me that last night she'd had a nightmare about going to a movie with a group of friends and subsequently being trapped inside said theater by the Joker—according to her they never actually saw him, but somehow knew he was there—who proceeded to creep up on her friends one by one and drag them away into the darkness, never to be seen again. And because I am me, my first thought was not "That would be awful" but "why can't I ever have cool Batman dreams?" Seriously, I've had one Batman dream that I can remember in my entire life, and that was a year before I started writing fan fiction. You think I'd dream about them more now that they're kicking around so greatly in my subconscious, but I guess not.

In other news, I have over nine hundred reviews. Holy cow. I love you people.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"Talk?"

Jonathan nodded, his death grip on Bruce's sleeve showing no signs of lessening. He was blushing a near-fluorescent shade of pink, to the point that he was practically glowing. Adorable, though Bruce was at a loss to figure out what topic of conversation was pressing enough that it possessed Jonathan to run over and initiate physical contact. Whatever it was, he doubted it would be good.

It occurred to him that he'd just thought of Jonathan as adorable while he stood, trying to think of a response. _Damn it._ Curse his subconscious thoughts and their habits of slipping in while he was otherwise distracted. This really wasn't fair. He liked _women_. Honestly. He'd admired Veronica last night, with her low-cut dress that clung tightly to what it did cover, as well as the beauty of her friends. Vicki had struck him as lovely as well, though his focus there had been on information. That attraction, he was accustomed to. He'd been feeling it ever since he'd gotten old enough to notice how his female friends were developing, and he'd never had a problem accepting that as a normal part of his life.

This attraction, however, was as unwelcome as it seemed unshakable.

"About what?" he managed, trying very hard to look at the hand on his sleeve rather that Jonathan's face, for fear of reawakening the sexual tension that had appeared so readily when last he thought about his feelings. Instead, he found himself wondering how long it had been since Jonathan had last initiated physical contact. There was a period of time, starting after Bruce had made the mistake of putting him in the bath, that Jonathan had seemed unable to function without contact, or at least close proximity, but that had changed at some point. He'd say it was after Scarecrow made his presence known, but Jonathan had still grabbed his hand and pulled him around the yard after that, though he wasn't exactly in a normal state of mind at the time.

Lately, though, they'd seemed almost back to the way things were right after Jonathan had regained sanity, except that the distance was caused by apprehension and not animosity. Until a moment ago when he'd grabbed Bruce's sleeve.

"I—" Jonathan let his arm drop slightly, though his hand remained tightly in place. "I don't know?"

_Joy. _So they could just stand there staring blankly at each other while he grew all the more conflicted about his feelings. And with any more luck, his libido—or auditory hallucination, or whatever it was—would reawaken and make suggestions that he could really do without hearing. "But you do want to talk?"

"Yes."

It was a bad idea, and that went without saying. The last thing he needed was time spent around a man he was inexplicably attracted to, especially without a specified topic of conversation. That sort of open-ended interaction could only lead to letting his mind wander to all the wrong places, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. He liked Jonathan. Bizarre as it had been when he'd first realized the friendship was genuine, and not, as he'd assumed it would be, a device to improve communication, he'd adjusted. This, on the other hand, he hadn't adjusted to, and nor did he want to.

Admiring the beauty of a person, even if that person had done terrible things, was one thing. Finding and enjoying the human traits in that person wasn't so bad either. But physical attraction to someone who would no doubt be violating all of Bruce's moral standards if he had freedom was crossing a line, and not a fine one either. And that was without taking into account the fact that Jonathan Crane was a mental patient and therefore unable to give informed consent, even if Bruce were to give into this madness, which he wasn't. He shouldn't be feeling this, just as he shouldn't feel fondness for the man, and the wise thing to do here would be to say no, walk away, and bring Jonathan back to Arkham as soon as the sunset.

Yet even knowing that, he couldn't bring himself to do it. Logic didn't hold a candle to the knowledge that, apart from the abusive voice in his head, Bruce was the only person Jonathan had to talk to. Well, Alfred, but he doubted Alfred was one to chat with men who'd set his surrogate son on fire. He ought to be—_needed _to be—back in the asylum, yes, but he wasn't, and there was no need to punish him with isolation on top of imprisonment, particularly once he'd agreed to the friendship. It hadn't been his wisest bargain, but he'd made it, and he felt compelled to honor it, detrimental as it was.

"Okay." It was exhausting to say, though it was only two syllables.

Jonathan relaxed, somewhat; his posture was no longer tense as that of a person before a firing squad, but his hand remained steadfastly clenched around the cuff of the shirt, as though he expected Bruce to run should he be released. _How much of that is the Scarecrow's influence?_ "Did you want to sit?"

Bruce found himself wondering how close by Alfred was, at this point. They hadn't been far from the kitchen door during the conversation in the hallway, and he hadn't thought to ask if Alfred had sought out him deliberately to reprimand him, or if he'd happened to be nearby at the time and simple come in because he'd overheard Bruce speaking. Because if it was the second option, the only thing he wanted less than having a conversation and risking his libido making itself known was having Alfred walk in again while he was flustered. The butler would recognize what was going on immediately, and that was a conversation he wanted to have even less than he'd wanted to be berated for his recklessness last night.

"Let's go upstairs," he offered, slowly walking forward. As he expected, Jonathan followed, finally letting go. He seemed to substitute holding on for standing directly behind his companion, with only enough distance to keep from being kicked when Bruce moved his legs to walk. Scarecrow couldn't be taking this well. The more Bruce thought about Jonathan's mental state, the more grateful he was that it wasn't his. Life was stressful enough with a horny side pushing for control, or a justice-obsessed one. He shuddered to think of how it would be with a hateful, paranoid one. "I promised Alfred I'd rest."

Alfred wasn't in the hallway, and there was no sign of him in any of the adjacent rooms. Maybe he'd jumped the gun on the decision to return to the master bedroom. The last thing he needed was Jonathan sitting—or lying—on his bed if he felt anything stir again. At least if they'd taken up space in Jonathan's guest bedroom, the knowledge of the security cameras would have underscored the need to stay calm. He wasn't worried about losing control and taking advantage, or any nonsense like that. He had more control than that, by far. But he wasn't sure if he had enough to keep his feelings completely hidden, and knowing Jonathan's own feelings, the thought made him more than a little nervous.

But they were on the stairs up by the time such thoughts hit him, so unless he wanted to arouse suspicion—and God knows what else—there was no choice but to finish the journey.

He sat against the headboard of the bed and Jonathan, much to his relief, sat at the foot. _So he's still wary about getting too close. _The sleeve-grab must have been a random act, or Scarecrow had convinced him against such actions during the walk.

"Are you cold?" Bruce asked, remembering all the complaints about temperature, the ones he hadn't heard in a while. Upon reflection, they might have ended when Jonathan got his own clothes back. Certainly they fit him better, and most of them were sweaters or something else insulating. Bruce supposed someone with such low body fat would get cold easily, especially when there wasn't much muscle to provide warmth either.

He wondered what the temperatures were like on average in Arkham.

Jonathan shook his head, rolling the ends of his sleeves between his fingers. That appeared to be his latest nervous habit. Better than tearing his nails off by far. "Are you all right?"

A pang of guilt for worrying Jonathan joined the one for worrying Alfred. "I'm fine. Really, I didn't tear the stitches out. Just…overexerted them."

"What did you do?"

It occurred to Bruce that he could actually _see _when Scarecrow spoke to Jonathan. It was more obvious when Jonathan answered—their conversations were signaled by his eyes moving to the side and his head just barely tilting—but there was a more subtle change when only one of them spoke, in which his eyes unfocused for a split second without changing direction. He assumed it was Scarecrow who'd spoken, on account of Jonathan's change in expression, and as the change gave him a mildly worried look, he guessed that the voice's suggestion was something along the lines of "He overexerted them by hurting our friends." Judging by the fact that Jonathan only looked vaguely concerned, however, Bruce further guessed that he didn't really believe the suggestion.

He was starting to question his own intelligence, for missing such obvious signs as to what was going on in his friend's head. _Has he always done that? _It was far too readily apparent to be overlooked for so long, both by himself and the staff at Arkham. "I picked one of the twins up. She wouldn't leave the cape alone, trying to figure out what it was made from."

Jonathan smiled, which, of course, added to his angelic countenance and did not aid Bruce's attempts to stop being attracted to him in the least. "Abigail?"

"Yes."

"I'm surprised she hadn't worked that one out, already. She has to know ridiculously durable and advantageous fabrics, tailoring for the Joker and Harley."

Meeting her certainly had reinforced his belief that whoever had designed the Joker's overcoat had to be insane. Bruce speculated, for a moment, on what sort of garments the Joker would come up with if the man had the patience to sit still long enough to design or sew. Something that would break the laws of physics, probably. His thoughts were abruptly cut short when Jonathan gasped. "What's wrong?"

"Harley!" His face had gone white, the color made all the more ghastly by the memory of how red it had been less than ten minutes ago. "She's still in Arkham, isn't she?"

"Yes." Bruce sat upright, mind racing, as he ran through the possibilities as to what could cause such sudden panic. Jonathan had always spoken of the asylum with fear—everyone did, aside from those too out of touch with reality to care—and considering the things that had gone on there even before the influx of costumed criminals, it was hardly foolish to consider the place a broken system. The abuse the inmates could be suffering… "Why? What do they d—"

"What if the Joker hasn't contacted her?" Cutting his hair hadn't ended his habit of tugging on it, as he was doing now. He opened his mouth to speak, stopped, started again. "Did—did they say where the Joker went, after they set his legs?"

"He stayed there."

"What?"

"He hurt himself again, somehow. Badly enough to be in traction. He'd only left a few hours before I arrived there. That's why I was in such a rush to get back." Bruce hadn't thought of Harleen Quinzel until now—he'd never known the Joker to break her out of Arkham when he was already loose—but obsessed as she was with the clown, not knowing if he was all right must be torture.

Bruce could easily see the Joker forgetting all about her, or leaving her out of the loop on purpose, either to make her worry and affection for him all the more poignant, or just for the fun of it. "He might have sent her a message—"

"But what if he hasn't?" He looked distraught in a way that Bruce had never seen before; a concern that wasn't directed at himself or Bruce. It made him all the more human, made his pain all the more real, real enough that Bruce felt almost as dismayed on his behalf. "Harley—she _needs _him. Needs to know that he's all right. She—she almost fell apart the first time he went missing, and that was before she'd even _confessed_ her love, or before he'd told her that he felt the same. She _has _to know that he's all right."

"So write to her."

Jonathan immediately fell silent, still gasping for air as if he'd been choked. "What?"

"Write to her. Tell her what you know." _I can read over it, make sure there's no mention of his location or who he's with. _He'd promised Alfred that he wouldn't go out again until he was healed, so leaving the note in her cell was out of the question, but there was still the postal service. An anonymous letter could raise suspicions, but Bruce had access to her files, after all. That gave him the names and addresses of her next of kin, and hopefully a letter from one of them wouldn't be too far out of the ordinary.

He realized, quite suddenly, that he didn't know which inmates' friends and family wrote to them, and which did not. Bruce was torn between viewing that as a failure on a professional and empathic level, and seeing it as a good distance to keep, considering the problems that befriending Jonathan had caused.

Slowly, Jonathan forced himself to breathe normally, untangling his hands from his hair in the process. He leaned forward, moving closer to Bruce as if that would make the suggestion clearer. "You would let me do that?" He was hesitant, though Bruce wasn't sure if that was from fear that he was being lied to or fear that asking would make the option somehow disappear.

_You shouldn't. _And Bruce knew what a risk it was, knew that asking was asking for something to go wrong. Even if the letter held no outward information, he had no way of knowing the relationship between Jonathan and Quinzel, or any inside references he could make as hints. For all he knew, the Arkhamites had devised a code for exactly this type of situation. "Yes. If it means that much to you."

Jonathan's lips moved before he spoke, working out the words before he formed them. "You would…trust me not to give something away?"

_Don't tell him that. _But he did. "Yes." He only prayed that wouldn't come back to bite him. "I would. I'm asking you not to betray that trust."

Jonathan nodded, mouthing "yes" without sound, as though he was too shocked to speak. His eyes were full of wonder and gratitude and a thousand other emotions that Bruce didn't have time to read before his friend threw himself forward, arms closing around Bruce's body, and lips meeting his.

He wasn't sure what shocked him more: that he was being kissed, or that he found himself kissing back. So much for control.


	81. Agreement

AN: You recall my last author's note, in which I mentioned that I'd only had one Batman dream in my life and that it hadn't involved the Joker? Well, my subconscious is taunting me. Last night I had a dream that was almost entirely about looking at photos and things of my roommate from last year and visiting her, only to have a non sequitur (and if a dream can have something qualify as a non sequitur, you know it's odd) in which my current roommate tackled me while wearing the Joker's suit and makeup. Yeah. I don't get it either, but I'm not counting it as a Batman dream because Jessi is not the Joker, no matter how awesome (and yet awful) it would be to have the Joker as a roommate.

On a side note, I then told her about the dream, and she apologized, as if she'd actually put on a purple suit and glomped me.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The small area of Jonathan's mind that wasn't lost to the moment wondered if he might not be hallucinating after all.

The Joker's visit and strange behavior had been possible, however unlikely. The clown was a master in the arts of escape and breaking and entering, after all, and he'd never been one to let things like pain or personal safety stand in the way of achieving a goal. On the contrary, he seemed to rather enjoy it. As for the illogicality of their conversation; well, when had the Joker ever tried to make sense? There must be some logic to it, weak or twisted as it might be, logic he might have had interest in analyzing if life at the moment wasn't so overwhelming. That he'd visited when Jonathan was nearly at the breaking point and given him astonishingly appropriate advice after only a few moments' worth of conversation was implausible, but not impossible, and certainly not a sign that Jonathan's hold on sanity was weakening.

This, however, was something else entirely. Jonathan would freely admit that he had little understanding of how romance worked—his last attempt at a relationship had ended with surgery to stitch his lung back up once they'd pulled his rib from it—but he knew that order and justice—or at least the Bat's perceptions of them—were the rules by which the man kissing him lived his life. They had become friends, true, even started trusting each other, but a civil conversation was a far cry from a make out session. All logic dictated that, unless Batman had been drugged and Jonathan didn't know it, this couldn't possibly be happening.

None of that mattered right now, though. What mattered was that there was a tongue in his mouth besides his own, and the Bat was holding back as tightly as he was being held. And for once, Scarecrow wasn't shouting or taking control to end the situation. He wasn't doing much of anything, actually, beyond making quiet, choked sounds, as if he was suffocating. Jonathan wasn't sure if that was from shock or a genuine lack of oxygen—they'd been kissing for more than a few minutes without a break—and he couldn't bring himself to care as long as Batman's lips were on his.

When Scarecrow _did_ regain composure, Jonathan was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn't starting shrieking, or fuming, or anything else that he'd done as of late in response to Jonathan's attempts to be friendly, or even just cooperate, with the Bat. Rather, he let things continue as before, with the sole exception being the moment when he took control of one hand, drawing it down from the side of Batman's face and snaking it toward the zipper of the man's jeans.

Which, of course, was the instant the Bat pulled away. _C'est la vie._ "What are you _doing_?"

Jonathan took a few seconds to regain his breath before answering, also taking the time to wonder when he'd worked his way onto Batman's lap._ Must have been Scarecrow's influence._ Well, there wasn't much point in lying. Especially when the Bat was holding Jonathan's wrist in place, so it was halted only an inch or so above the fly. "Trying to take off your pants?"

He wasn't sure if he was disappointed or relieved when Batman's shocked expression did not become receptive at the explanation. Sex had always been Scarecrow's interest. Not that Jonathan disliked gratification, but the act was so intimate. Besides, the one time he'd been on anything but the receiving end of a carnal act with the Joker, he'd nearly suffocated and spent the entire time terrified of messing things up somehow and being maimed for it. "_Why_?"

Suddenly and inappropriately, Jonathan was struck by how degradingthis was. He was bringing himself back to a level he'd sworn not to return to after the Joker exploited it, leaving his desires and emotions as bare and vulnerable as he did during fits of insanity when he couldn't control it. And now Batman had the gall to stare at him as though he hadn't been kissing back every bit as passionately. "I don't know. Why was your tongue inside my face?"

He looked taken aback, and Jonathan felt guilt in spite of Scarecrow's assurances that his cold tone had been more than warranted.

"I think," he said, to counter the slight, "that it's obvious what both of us were doing. I was…taking things up a notch." Oh God, there was a wonderfully unintentional double entendre. That was all they needed; the Bat assuming that he was reducing the moment to sexual puns.

The world's greatest detective didn't pick up on it, thankfully; judging by the pallor of his face, he was too stunned to process statements on anything deeper than face value. "But you—you're not—you don't l—"

"I _do_ l—like you." He caught himself before he let "love" slip. Honesty might have been the best policy, but not when a segment of that honesty was threatening to send the receiver into cardiac arrest. "Don't act like you didn't realize it. I know that you've known ever since—ever since you woke up after that." He gestured to Batman's right side, feeling blood rush to his face. He couldn't bring himself to say "since I kissed you," despite how forward he was with the rest of things. And it was forward, uncharacteristically so, but there was no hiding it now. There was a chance, however small, of a favorable outcome if he pursued this, and it wasn't as if he had anything left to lose. Apart from dignity. "And you must have enjoyed yourself, or you would have stopped me."

There were too many expressions gracing Batman's features at once for Jonathan to read them all. He hoped at least one of them was longing. "I…I wasn't thinking." The words were slow to form, as if he was speaking through water. So the kiss had conflicted him to the point where he couldn't speak correctly. That hardly boded well.

"Neither was I." Jonathan dropped the harsh edge from his tone. The Bat wasn't denying that they'd had a glorious make out session, so there was no point in berating him unless he tried to claim that it hadn't been glorious. "And that's not always a bad thing."

"Jonathan." Batman met his eyes and promptly looked away. Whether it was a sign of complete remorse or desire that he was trying to keep at bay, Jonathan couldn't tell. "What happened—we shouldn't have—"

"But we did," he protested, grabbing the Bat's hands. It was trick of Batman's that had never failed to claim his own undivided attention, so there was a chance it would work here. "And while you have a habit of kissing women to put on a front for the media, I doubt the same applies for asylum escapees locked up in your house. So you liked it."

"That's—" Now that there was more time to observe the internal conflict playing out on his face, Jonathan got the distinct feeling that desire _was _a part of it. It occurred to him, quite suddenly, that the aloofness he'd viewed as disgust over the past few days might have been something else entirely. "You caught me off guard—"

"And for all your ninja training, the only defense you could think of was to French me?" He was stunned by his own directness, but he couldn't bring himself to stop. Maybe it was stress, or longing, but whatever the trigger, what he wanted most was finally within his grasp, and he wasn't letting it slip through his fingers. "You wanted it just as much as I did, and you're not getting rid of me that easily."

* * *

Between a rock and a hard place hardly began to cover it.

Control. _Control. _It had been stressed so strongly throughout his life; by Alfred, in regards to his outbursts after his parents' murder, by his school teachers and college professors, and, above all, in the League of Shadows. One would think, as much as it had been drilled into his head that his very _life _could depend on keeping himself under control, that he would have enough restraint to move away or close his lips, or do _anything _beyond snogging right back, and letting his tongue work its way into Jonathan's mouth besides.

Though to be fair, control in the League of Shadows had been more along the lines "keep your temper so you won't make a stupid move and get yourself killed" and less about "do not kiss back when a madman pulls himself onto your lap and starts expressing his affections." He wasn't sure Ra's al Ghul would be equipped to deal with such a situation, and even if he had been, Bruce didn't want to know about it.

"I'm not trying to get rid of you," he managed, to buy time while he tried to force his brain into functioning normally. It had felt good—_much _better than good, if he wanted to be honest with himself, which he didn't—but it couldn't happen. There were a number of reasons why—Jonathan's insanity, Bruce's heterosexuality, the fact that it could never be a stable relationship—but the reasons didn't matter as much as the outcome. It simply could _not _happen.

"Just trying to deny that we kissed." Jonathan's location on his body did nothing to relieve the blood that had flowed to the lower areas of his anatomy. "And I won't let you do that."

_When did he become so forceful? _Bruce would never have guessed that he'd see the day he'd hope for the return of the broken, near-mute psychiatrist, but here it was. "All right, we kissed."

"And you liked it."

This, this was why he should have forced Jonathan back into Arkham. Then his secret would have been safe, his life that much calmer, and he'd never have developed a crush on a man who'd set him on fire, poisoned him, and was now clinging to his hands with a death grip, refusing to let go until he got what he wanted. Which would probably be a public declaration of love or something equally mad. "That's not the po—"

"Yes, it is." He hadn't heard such an edge to Jonathan's voice since the first night he'd encountered him in the apartment, when he'd been poisoned and burned. Determination was not always a trait to be admired. "You liked it and I liked it, and I'm not letting you brush it under the rug."

"We're not doing that again."

Jonathan leaned forward, and Bruce found himself backed against the headboard, with nowhere else to go. The man's lips were only a few inches from his own, perhaps less. "I disagree."

_When did he become a sex kitten?_ And for that matter, when did he start thinking of the criminals with terms like sex kitten? Madness was contagious. That had to be it. "Jonathan."

"Bruce." He almost purred it. Bruce found himself wondering how much of this was the Joker's influence, from when they'd been together, or Scarecrow's. He had no idea if Scarecrow had seductive talents—and now that he thought about it, he refused to let his mind go on speculating about which of them was a better flirt—but he did seem more abrasive and outspoken, and Jonathan was anything but demure now.

"What we did was wrong."

"Why, because I'm a man?" Jonathan pulled back by another few inches, managed a brief, almost patronizing look. "Because there happens to be a thing called bisexuality, and even if you want to deny that, I've been told I'm feminine enough."

It took several seconds after that statement for Bruce to manage speech. "No." And honestly, in spite of all his insistence that he liked women—which he_ did_—Jonathan's Y chromosome was the least of his problems at the moment. The fact that he was an untreated maniac who killed and tortured in the name of research ranked rather higher on the list of Things Wrong With This. "Look—you can't give consent. Legally. And for me to do these things—it's taking advantage—"

"And you can't run around in a Batsuit practicing your own brand of justice. Legally. If they ever caught you, they'd call you just as crazy as they think I am, and you'd be thrown in Arkham too. So don't act as if you're taking the moral high ground."

It wasn't the same thing, and the flicker of worry that broke, if only for a second, Jonathan's otherwise composed expression suggested that he knew it. "You can't stay here forever—"

"You_ said_ that I could." Another tremor through the exterior, this time in his voice. Bruce wasn't sure if it was the fear of Arkham or the idea of leaving his crush that panicked him, but it couldn't be clearer that he wasn't as controlled as he pretended.

"I said that you could stay for now," he said gently. Bruce didn't want to frighten him, not any more than absolutely necessary, but he had to understand that this _couldn't _work. It would save him so much suffering, in the end. It would spare the both of them. "But Jonathan, you can't stay forever. I'm not keeping you locked up for your entire life."

"But I don't mind it." He hadn't thought it was possible for Jonathan to hold any tighter. Clearly, he'd been wrong. "And that's what Arkham will do anyway, and you _like _me. I _know_ that you do."

"Yes, I do." _Hell. _He should not have said that. "And it's because of that that I'm not keeping you prisoner. I want you to get help—"

"And you think I'll get it at _Arkham_?" Jonathan made a sound that had probably been intended as a derisive laugh, but came out strangled. "Because if you believe _that, _you're the one who needs help."

"I—"

"I feel _safe _around _you._" Bruce realized, with a rush of both guilt and sympathy, that there were tears coming to Jonathan's eyes. The threat of leaving had shattered his composure that quickly, which, if it was any indication as to the depth of his feelings, was terrible. "I _care _about you, and I never care about _anyone._ You help me when there's no advantage to you and actually care about my happiness even when I've done nothing to warrant it, and I _trust_ you despite everything we've been through. This isn't like the Joker, and I'm _not _just falling for you because you're nice to me."

He paused, released one of Bruce's hands to wipe his eyes with his sleeve.

"Jonathan—"

"The more time I spend with you, the more I realize that what you do is actually about helping people, even if you do go about it all wrong and it's only to work out your own issues, and I can't bring myself to hate you, even for what you did to me, and it's not Stockholm Syndrome or anything stupid like that, it's actual _love. _I _love _you, and I want to spend time with you, and you're not a negative influence so stop creating excuses as to why you're bad for me, and stop trying to throw me out!"

He was crying in earnest now, though he did it silently. Bruce hadn't seen him this exposed since the first trip outside, and to say that it pulled at his heartstrings would be like saying that sulfuric acid stung upon skin contact. "I—I don't want to do you more harm than—"

Another laugh that wasn't. "Look at me, Bruce. _Look_ at me. Do you honestly think that _anything_ you could do would fuck me up any worse than I already am?" He shook his head, face reddened. Not by blood for once, but tears. "Please. _Please_. Just…don't get rid of me. Even if you d-don't want this. Please."

And he _did _want it, much as he wanted to deny that from himself. He _had_ denied it, up until the moment they kissed, and even after that, he'd tried to bury it again. But seeing Jonathan cry, seeing him so desperate just to stay in the mansion, that struck him too deeply. Bruce did care for him, but it went beyond that. He couldn't remember the last time he'd wanted to hold someone so tightly, or closely, or make a person happy. Not since Rachel had died, at least. And he _knew_ it was wrong, knew all the things that Jonathan had done without remorse, but that didn't matter.

He was a human being, not a monster, and all that he'd done paled in comparison—though Bruce knew that it shouldn't—to what Bruce had come to know and see of him since he'd first been inside the cave. Beyond that, he knew the secret, and he understood, though through a distorted frame of reference, the duality Bruce struggled with, the battle between the face that everyone else saw and the person beneath it. Not that it atoned for his crimes, or made him sane, but attraction had never been sensible. Much as he wanted to deny it—and he wanted that less, seeing what it did to Jonathan—he felt attraction. Madness or not, remorse or not, penis or not.

Of course, there was no reason why he shouldn't hide that desire. It would be better in the long run, because the fact of the matter remained that Jonathan couldn't stay forever. It was wrong, to enter a relationship with a mental patient, and in a way, he was using Jonathan as a release, so it was right to keep it locked away, even if he let him remain.

But he couldn't do that, selfish as that made him. Because he wanted it every bit as badly as Jonathan did.

He didn't speak, using his now-free hand to stroke Jonathan's face, and, when his companion looked up, Bruce leaned in to kiss him. It was brief, close-mouthed, hardly passionate, but he'd intended it to be more reassuring than anything else.

And judging from the way Jonathan's face lit up as he smiled, Bruce had succeeded.


	82. Discovered

AN: Last night I had a phone conversation in which I learned that my cat (yes, the one I got toward the beginning of writing this) was run over and killed by car. I wasn't in the most productive of writing moods last night, for obvious reasons, and truth be told, I'm still not now, but I'd rather do something to preoccupy my time than not.

Thanks for the reviews.

* * *

Batman's body was warm, and, more importantly, solid, and lying against it as Jonathan was doing provided a much needed sense of stability that the ever-shifting mattress and pillows couldn't hope to provide. It felt unreal, still, even with Batman's arms around him, and after the agreement. And all the kissing. Overwhelming as this was, the kissing had been nice.

As was being held. Lying on the bed, secure and motionless. The Joker had always been moving, either around the room or simply twitching his fingers. It had never bothered Jonathan at the time, but upon reflection, this was better. _Much better. _Being with the Joker was akin to standing on sand that washed away with the tides; a wonderful sensation, but hardly stable. This, this was…different.

He glanced at the man beside him and wondered, with a rush of blood to his cheeks, if the Bat's blood might not be concentrated in _other _places, given what a slut he'd been while taking advantage of the situation. Common courtesy dictated that he ought to provide relief, as the condition would be his fault to begin with, and besides, the kiss he'd received after his outburst was presumably Batman's way of saying that they were an item, and that was something he should do for his partner.

He wasn't sure he wanted to.

Not out of disgust or fear; if Jonathan could kiss him without being having a panic attack or vomiting, it stood to reason that a sex act, as long as it progressed slowly, shouldn't cause him to panic and kick his newfound boyfriend in the face, or something else equally irrational. But if he could mark the point in his relationship where things really started to go south, he'd begin with the part where he'd, in full—unknowing—view of the security cameras, let the Joker touch him in Gotham General. The fact that he'd only ever been intimate with the man who'd betrayed and then horribly beaten him didn't help matters. Or that he'd never been all that enthralled with sex to begin with.

Scarecrow was, though. He might be interested in relieving his own tension, despite his feelings toward Batman. Or not. He'd been silent for some time, and the link was closed, which hardly indicated good things about his response.

Jonathan chose to risk it. _Scarecrow?_

For a moment, he thought there would be no answer. _What is it?_ Scarecrow sounded pained, angry. And wearied, more than anything else. As if he'd lost the will to truly care anymore. So this romance had done that much damage to him.

Stomach clenching, Jonathan felt his heart sink. _Are you all right?_

_This was your choice. I'm not going to hold it against you, no matter what I think of it._

And he thought of it poorly, that much was plain. _Damn it. _Why, w_hy _couldn't things go right just _once _in his life? He was out of Arkham, sane as long as he had the prescription, which he did, the man he wanted more than he'd even _known_, until he declared his love, had not only _not _rejected him, but apparently felt the same way, and things would be perfect, absolutely _perfect_, if only Scarecrow would be happy. _I don't want you to think poorly of it._

_I can't trust him. _He said it quietly, sadly, but he said it with determination. _Jonathan, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to ruin the moment for you. But the way I see it, our relationships always end badly, and that goes double for the romantic ones. Maybe I'm wrong. For your sake, I _hope _I am. But the Batman, of all people, isn't a man that I'm going to put my faith in._

Jonathan shifted, clung tighter to Batman. The Bat readjusted his grip in response, without question. One of his hands stroked Jonathan's shoulder. Not with a worried pressure, or a slow, sensuous motion, but a gesture of comfort. Why couldn't Scarecrow see that? _He's letting us stay. _No, it was more than that. _And he knows—he knows what I feel—and he's not disgusted by it. By me._

_I know. _He felt Scarecrow stroke the opposite shoulder, and he couldn't tell if the movement was meant to copy the Bat's, or rival it. _I'm not saying that he's mistreating you. Not outwardly. Maybe—maybe not even _consciously, _if he does. But I can't forgive him, for all that he's done. _Cannot. _I made the mistake of forgiving the Joker the last time around, and I can't let myself do it again._

There was logic to what he said, and that was undeniable. The fact of the matter was that every person he'd trusted throughout his life—the Joker, Harley, and briefly, his mother and great-grandmother—had betrayed that trust, all of them but Scarecrow. Experience taught him that this could only end badly.

But then, the law of average said that he'd never been more due for a break. _Do you really think he'd do that?_

_I don't know. I know it's not a risk I'll take, but I want it to go well for you, Jonathan. I mean that._

"How is he?"

Startled, Jonathan went rigid, eyes snapping form the empty space they'd been staring off into and moving to meet Batman's. "What?"

"You were talking to him, weren't you?" The Bat moved the hand from Jonathan's shoulder to the side of his face, with the other arm holding him securely. "Scarecrow. Is something wrong?"

The link with his other half was closed once more, as Jonathan found when he tried reaching out. Scarecrow must have done it while Batman was still speaking, when Jonathan was too distracted to notice. Wonderful. If this was any indication as toward the future of their communication, then this was not going to be smooth sailing. "I—how did you know we were talking?"

Batman smiled. There was nothing malicious about it, though he did look amused. "The blank expression and the way your eyes moved helped."

"And yet no one at Arkham ever noticed." Yet another piece of evidence, as if he needed any more, that everyone at the institution apart from himself, was completely and utterly incompetent. The Bat was a genius, true, but if it was as blatant as his description made it sound, anyone with a healthy amount of brain cells ought to have noticed Jonathan's internal conversations long ago.

Batman's interpretation was, predictably, more generous. "I think it's only apparent because I know about him."

He couldn't imagine that Scarecrow liked being so easily recognized, even without the emotional connection open to confirm it. Reminding him that Batman understood him—parts of him, at least—so easily had to be a slap in the face. Especially considering how short an amount of time the Bat had known of his existence. "Can we not talk about him?"

The concern that had surfaced when Jonathan snapped to attention remerged, but he had enough control to keep it subdued, fortunately. "Are you all right?"

Oh, things were really not going to work if Batman thought that his alter ego was abusing him. "I'm fine. Honestly. Better than fine." He searched his mind for a change of topic and, finding none, went with the next best option. The next best option being moving himself as close against the Bat as he possibly could, in a manner that was platonic at current, but could become easily sexual if he applied pressure with his hips.

Batman fell silent. Sometimes, he could be so predictable, but in Jonathan's experience, such moments were far from boring.

* * *

If Bruce was being rational, he would have allowed himself to breathe, because he needed oxygen, and that certainly wasn't a need that would go away if he ignored it. It was hard to be rational, however, when he considered the fact that, close as Jonathan was, breathing would move his own body and take that closeness from simultaneously adorable and sexy, to very, very awkward. Bruce had yet to recover from the…excited state that kissing passionately with Jonathan sitting on his lap had brought about.

Lungs burning, he tried for the shallowest breath he could manage. So far, so good. "Jonathan?"

"I like being near you." Why was it that he looked, when flirting as he was now, more like the cold manipulator he'd been on the streets than he did when he was angry or shouting? Bruce found himself wondering how much of their interactions up to this point had been a manipulation, and more importantly, how much he'd actually care if it had all been false.

"I—I'm glad you're happy." _I am not going to have sex with him. I am _not _going to have sex with him. _It was bad enough to let him stay—holding Jonathan like this, he didn't regret it at the moment, but he got the feeling that he would, when the blood flowed back to his brain—but to have sex with a mental patient who couldn't give consent, legally…it may not be a violation of his one rule, but it was wrong nonetheless.

And besides, if this relationship—Christ, when had it become a _relationship_?—was going to work, there were many, many issues that needed to be resolved before they slept together. Like Jonathan's little problem with trying to experiment on people, or his obvious fear of Bruce when the latter wore the Batsuit. Not to mention the fact that he was an Arkham escapee who couldn't go out into public without being arrested, or the issue of the malicious voice in his head. And, most importantly of all, figuring out when the hell Bruce had become bisexual.

So sex was most definitely out of the question. Which, considering all the conflicts, would be easy if Jonathan wasn't _that _sort of a kitten.

The one part of his mind that hadn't been overthrown by his libido—which, at the moment, was being as unhelpful as possibly by loudly and continually suggesting "Take him now!"—took control of his hands, sliding them down to Jonathan's hips and pushing the man away by an inch or so. Upon reflection, that part of him was probably Batman. "Please don't do that."

Was it wishful thinking, or did Jonathan look relieved? "Did I hurt the stitches?"

The stitches. And to think he'd sworn off strenuous activity. Alfred would kill him. Come to think of it, the wound hadn't pained him at all. Instantaneous healing was unlikely, so it must have been the distraction. A distraction that he wouldn't mind using as a painkiller again. _Can't think like that. _"No. They're fine."

"Oh." Jonathan looked more concerned, if anything, perhaps worried that he'd done something wrong. It was uncanny, his ability to make even the negative emotions look endearing.

"It's not anything you did," Bruce assured him. He considered stroking Jonathan's hair, but, remembering that such an action would entail moving his hands from the position that kept the man from accidentally—or, more likely, intentionally—stimulating him. "Just…I don't want to rush into things."

He _did _look relieved. "Neither do I."

Bruce released him at that, holding Jonathan's left hand, the one with the nail gun scar, in his own. It felt as if he was realizing for the first time how slender Jonathan was, how fragile he seemed in comparison to Bruce. There wasn't even that great of a height difference between them, only three or so inches, but it seemed greater, as the age gap seemed far wider than Jonathan being just two years younger. It might have been the man's mental instability, or just his near-feminine beauty. Whatever it was, it hardly helped to enforce the reminder that this was legally, morally wrong.

Jonathan leaned forward, only with his upper body—perhaps sensing Bruce's discomfort—and kissed him, as briefly as Bruce had when he'd silently consented to try this relationship, for better or for worse. It was different than kissing Rachel, and not just in the amount of passion. It was just _different_, as kissing varied between every woman he'd ever locked lips with, but not in a bad way, or even an uncomfortable one, once he'd gotten over the mental confusion of kissing someone without two X chromosomes. Which had happened as soon as he'd closed his eyes. He wasn't Rachel, obviously, but he wasn't unpleasant in the least. Quite the opposite, actually.

He chose not to continue the kiss, instead pulling Jonathan closer, holding him as securely as he could without crushing ribs. Maybe it wasn't right—the back of his mind was reminding him with all the insistence his libido had had that it was _not_—but he didn't care. He enjoyed this, selfish though it may be, as did Jonathan, and despite his partner's obvious insanity, he seemed lucid about these feelings, and it didn't feel like taking advantage. Bruce wasn't sure if what he was feeling was love, but whatever it was, he hadn't felt it since Rachel died, and he welcomed its return.

Jonathan rested his head on Bruce's shoulder, returning the hug with equal force. It was at that moment that Alfred walked through the door, Bruce's cell phone in hand. "Master Wayne, Miss Vale wanted you to know that she call—"

Bruce had never known his butler to stare with mouth agape, but there was a first time for everything.

* * *

AN: At least according to the Internet Movie Database, Cillian Murphy (born in 1976) is 5 foot 9 inches, whereas Christian Bale (born in 1974) is 6 foot.


	83. Standing Ground

AN: I want to say thank you to everyone for their well wishes after the last chapter. It was such a sweet and greatly needed reminder of all the support I have, and it really helped. Sorry I've been slow on the review replies, but I can't begin to describe how much I appreciated everyone's condolences.

Also, I have another wonderful fan art to show off, from Puck-Sexton on Deviantart: puck-sexton. deviantart. com/ art/ Shadow-Selves-142704695

Thank you so much!

* * *

Jonathan had never been able to articulate exactly what it was about the butler that frightened him.

It could have been the man's absolute lack of a response to certain things, such as coming face to face with the Joker. Most people would have some outward emotion toward the Clown Prince of Crime, be it anger or terror. The single time Jonathan had seen them together, the butler couldn't have cared less. True, he worked for Batman, so it would take more to get a rise from him than the average Gothamite, but one might think that a man who blew up buildings and or people as a _hobby _would warrant a raised brow.

Then again, he was British. And had been in the military.

_Still_. His total indifference to everything—apart from the time Batman had been injured—was more than a little unnerving. A normal person would not be unaffected by the fact that someone he cared deeply about was dressing as a bat and risking his life every night for the sake such an impossible task as reclaiming Gotham from urban crime, as the butler acted. Which suggested that the man was just as mad as Jonathan had considered—and Scarecrow still believed—the Bat to be. And he had access to Batman's weaponry. From the way he carried himself, he likely still had the skill and agility necessary for most of those implements.

And he didn't have Batman's code against killing.

That sort of person was the stuff of nightmares. Jonathan considered it a personal accomplishment that his fear had never manifested beyond keeping silent and motionless as possible around him—which he doubted he'd be able to do now. He wasn't terrified of the butler, and being in close proximity to him didn't spark the raw fear that being near an angry Joker ignited, but he was still frightening in his own subtle way.

Even when he was having a normal human reaction, such as gaping, as he was doing now. If anything, that was all the more unsettling, because it served as a reminder that he was human beneath all the composure. As the Joker was human under his makeup, and the knowledge of that only pointed out that monsters could be people too. He found himself almost relieved when the butler managed to control his reaction, switching from an open-mouthed stare to closed-mouthed, far more subdued look of anger and disapproval. "Master Wayne."

Batman, who looked as if he'd just been doused with liquid nitrogen, lay there for a moment, speechless, before slowly unwinding his hands from Jonathan's body.

_He's not even going to defend you. Bastard._

"Jonathan." The word bordered on hoarse. "Why don't you go get started on that letter you wanted to write?"

He didn't take the time to nod, pulling himself upright and walking, briskly as he could without making his tension obvious, out of the master bedroom. Not through the door into the hall, because the butler was standing there and he wasn't about to risk it, but into the bathroom. He locked the door behind him, wondering as he did when the Bat had repaired the lock after breaking it when Jonathan had last closed himself off inside. There were no pens, pencils, or keyboards here, and no paper, aside from the type that wouldn't hold up too well to being written on anyway, but he considered sitting in the bathroom doing nothing to be a far better—and safer—use of his time than remaining in the bedroom.

* * *

"I'm going to assume that you have an explanation for this, sir."

Bruce ran through the possible answers he could give, and which one was least likely to end with him chained to the bed while Alfred dragged Jonathan, kicking and screaming, back to Arkham Asylum. Lying would have been easy—clingy as Jonathan was even before confessing his feelings, something like "I was lying here and he hugged me" would have been easy, and at least bought him the time to explain why he was hugging back—except that Alfred could always tell. And taking into account all the other things he'd done as of late to make the butler short with him, he doubted that lying would win any points.

It was best to tell the truth. At least, in theory. Now that he'd acknowledged his feelings for Jonathan, he didn't want to lose him, no matter how selfish it was to keep him from treatment. Alfred was going to find out eventually, assuming he hadn't figured it out by now. Which, going by his expression, he clearly had. So Bruce should just say it, and get the ensuing fight over with.

But that was only theory. In practice, he shuddered to think of the reaction that was sure to provoke. So he took the middle ground, denying nothing but making the most minor of confessions he could at the same time. "We were hugging."

"That much was apparent." He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Alfred look so disapproving. Not during their conversation at breakfast, and not during the lecture after he'd been stabbed. Actually, now that he thought back on it, probably not since he'd driven through the streets of Gotham like a madman after Rachel had been poisoned in the basement of Arkham. "I was inquiring as to why."

So much for evading the question. Though, there was still the question of his privacy being violated. Not that such an argument held much water, as he'd left the bedroom door open. "I have to have an explanation for hugging people?"

"When those people are amoral Arkham escapees who have previously poisoned and set flame to you, yes. Yes, you do."

Bruce had had a feeling that Alfred wouldn't be quick to forget that. Truth be told, he wasn't sure when it had stopped mattering to _him._ Only that it had. He took a breath—the stitches only stung briefly, for how deeply he'd inhaled—released, and swallowed. "I was hugging him because he hugged me." Again, it wasn't untrue. It just wasn't the whole truth.

And it wasn't fooling Alfred. "Then I take it you considered it a good idea to embrace a man who was once dead set on destroying you before he decided that he was in love with you, instead?"

This was completely unfair. He was an adult, and the people he embraced—or kissed or thought about ravishing—were his business, and no one else's. Alfred didn't question him about the women he dated. Or what he did from night to night when he was out, breaking the law to defend it, unless he came home grievously injured or noticeably distraught. True, this was different, because this was a person who'd run away from a mental institution and had no qualms about poisoning people, and a man, besides. Not that he'd ever observed Alfred to take offense to same sex relationships, but he had a feeling the butler would have a hard time adjusting if it was his surrogate son in that sort of partnership. Especially with Jonathan Crane as the partner. Still. "Yes."

Alfred's eye gave a nearly microscopic twitch. "May I ask when you're planning to return the doctor to Arkham, Master Wayne?"

Trust Alfred to cut right to the heart of the issue. He swallowed again, and his throat had gone so dry that the act was about as painful as the ache in the stitches had been. "I'm not."

"I beg your pardon, sir?" His voice had gone flat, cold and disbelieving enough to make Bruce cringe. He honestly couldn't recall the last time he'd heard Alfred sound like this.

"I—I like him. I want him to stay."

* * *

Jonathan held a hand under the spray of the shower to test the water as he stepped out of his jeans. Upon entering the bathroom, showering had suddenly seemed the next logical step. It occurred to him, even as he slid off the briefs and stepped inside, that this left him all the more vulnerable, should the butler break through the door to drag him out of the manor and back to Arkham—and Jonathan wouldn't be surprised if the method of said dragged involved dangling him from the back of the car during the ride. With all the times he'd watched _Psycho_, he ought to know that showers and tense situations were a terrible combination, but his hair had looked borderline greasy when he glanced at it in the mirror—no doubt due to Scarecrow usurping their recent showers to engage in…other activities besides bathing—and he felt compelled to wash it, security be damned.

Sometimes he wondered about the order of his priorities.

The Bat's bathroom was much larger than the one adjacent to the guest bedroom, though considering that this was the master bath, he supposed it was to be expected. It occurred to him while scrubbing his hair, after he'd spent several minutes speculating on the cost of Batman's toiletries, that he hadn't been forcibly evicted yet. Which meant that the Bat had either effectively lied, or was in the process of defending him. _I knew he cared._

_Maybe._

Jonathan resisted the urge to sigh, wondering what it would take for Scarecrow to accept that Bruce might not be out to make them suffer after all. To be fair, it had taken Jonathan weeks. _You've seen the butler. Why would he go up against him if he didn't care?_

_I don't know. _Scarecrow ran a hand through their hair; tried winding it, but the shampoo made that difficult. _I…I'm really not trying to rain on your parade…but he's close to the butler. He might not be afraid of him. Or maybe he doesn't want to give up his plaything. The same way the Joker attacked that idiot who split your head open during that robbery._

Scarecrow could make the steaming water feel like ice in five sentences or less. _He's _not _the Joker._

_I know. But that doesn't make him a saint either._

_I thought that you wanted this to go well for me._

_I do. _Scarecrow hugged him so tightly he couldn't raise his hands to scrub at the lather in his hair. _That's why I'm being cautious._

_That's. _He stopped, started again. _I appreciate that. Really. But he hasn't done anything suspect yet, you know._

_I know. Except—_Scarecrow shook his head, trailing off as he released Jonathan.

Despite himself, he felt a flicker of anxiety. _Except what?_

_Well, what's his interest with Vicki Vale, and why is she calling him at home?_

* * *

Bruce wasn't sure when he'd ended up in front of the bathroom doorway, blocking Alfred's path. He'd been lying on the bed at one moment, and standing on the opposite side of the room the next, and judging from the pain in his side, he'd moved quickly. But he had no memory of it whatsoever, aside from a sudden blur after Alfred had moved toward the bathroom.

He hadn't realized keeping Jonathan in the manor had meant that much to him.

"Move, Master Wayne."

"No." God, did this sound like the arguments they'd had when he was a stupid teenager. He only prayed that his reasoning here wasn't as idiotic as it had been back in the day. "Jonathan isn't hurting anything by staying here."

"Debatable." Alfred hadn't moved any closer to the door since Bruce had blocked it. Obviously it wasn't a question of fighting—Bruce would never lay a hand on him and they both knew it—but he had the feeling Alfred could force him out of the way, if he really wanted to. Whether he hadn't out of fear of tearing the stitches or out of some willingness to listen was anyone's guess. "What is not debatable is the fact that he is a mental patient, and it's hurting _him _to stay here."

Of course he'd use the one argument that Bruce couldn't disprove. "It hasn't made him worse."

Alfred arched a brow. "He was prone to sobbing fits and shouting matches inside his own head at Arkham, then?"

True, and that only made the conflict all the more poignant. His Bat side still wanted Jonathan gone. Out of the house, and back in a cell, personal feelings aside. But he couldn't do it. He just couldn't. "I promised him I wouldn't make him leave."

"And you can break that promise if it's for the greater good."

Of course he had to be logical about things. If he'd been completely irrational, arguing against him would have been simple. Which nothing in Bruce's life was. So why should this be an exception? "I don't _want _him to leave, Alfred."

"Which is all the more sign that he needs to."

_And you've got no right to make that decision. _Concern, he knew, was the motivating factor here. That didn't make it all right. This was far from the most destructive choice he'd ever made, and who he shared his bed with—not that he planned on doing that—was no one's business but his own. The only argument that held water was the insanity one, and he didn't plan on going back on his word. "I'm not taking him back."

"Master Wayne. _Think _about the man you're dealing with."

"Think about what I was like after my parents died."

Alfred paused, though he didn't look any more open to the idea when he spoke again. "It's not comparable."

"I disagree." He moved from the doorway toward Alfred, and the butler didn't try to move around him. "I trust him. You probably think that's stupid—"

"Definitely think."

"Fine, you _definitely _think it's stupid. But it's not your place to decide. I made a promise and I intend to keep it. And beyond that, I want him to stay. I—I enjoy his company. If things go wrong, I give you every right to tell me that you told me so, and never let me forget it."

"If this goes wrong, I don't know that you'll be around to tell."

Bruce softened. Not enough to stand down, but enough to appreciate the worry. "I will be. I promise that I'll be careful. Alfred, I know you don't approve, but this is my choice."

Alfred didn't step aside, or change his stance. He still looked appalled by the idea. But, there was some intangible difference, some concession. "For your sake, sir, I hope it's the right choice."

"I hope so too."


	84. You Always Hurt the One You Love

AN: If you're wondering in this chapter how Scarecrow can do things like rinse Jonathan's hair for him through mind-touching, the answer's that he really isn't. It's Jonathan acting on his own; he just doesn't realize it.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

The water felt like ice again. It was uncomfortable for all of five seconds before he found himself becoming numb to it. Jonathan supposed his body had blocked out the sensation from shock, or that his mind was overwhelmed with processing Scarecrow's last statement, and searching for an explanation which didn't end with Batman and that reporter screwing each other like rabbits. _How could you suggest that?_

_You're the one who asked me to say it. _He could sense Scarecrow's presence right beside him, but his other half made no attempt to initiate contact. Jonathan wasn't sure whether he considered that a good thing or not. Scarecrow had destroyed yet another moment of solace, which seemed to happen whenever Jonathan was nearing carefree happiness, but then, Jonathan had told him to go on. And besides, much as he hated to admit it, it was a valid point, and he wanted contact, reassurance. _I knew you wouldn't want to hear it._

True again, but he couldn't keep himself from snapping. _Then you shouldn't have said it._

_Jonathan, I'm sorry. _He felt Scarecrow's hands on his shoulders, hesitant at first, with barely more force than the water spraying from the shower head. When he didn't respond, his alter ego put the full weight of his hands down, and Jonathan sighed. _I am. I just—I can't—_

_I know, _he answered flatly, making no move to relax into the embrace or push away his other half. _You can't trust him. But in case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to._

_I don't want what happened with the Joker to happen again._

_It won't. _Jonathan shook his head. It _couldn't_. Batman wouldn't do that. When the Joker had used them, it was a means to an end, first for the laughing toxin and then as a distraction for the Bat while he ran away. The romance between had been for the Joker's own amusement and gratification, never Jonathan's. Batman had hurt them, and there was no denying that, but never out of malice. Just to retrieve information or to subdue.

Aside from the time he'd turned the toxin on Jonathan and left without providing the antidote…

_No. _He clenched his teeth, shut his eyes so tightly it was painful. He was not going to dwell on that. This was one of the rare good moments in his life, and he wasn't going to jeopardize it by overanalyzing and magnifying every fault. Besides, he knew the warning signs of a dangerous relationship, from his mother, Harley, and the Joker, and this time around, he knew to get out.

Presuming he _could _get out, being a prisoner. No. Batman wouldn't keep him from leaving. He'd had to beg to stay to begin with.

Scarecrow had said something. Jonathan jolted, opened his eyes. _What?_

_I said, if I have a problem again, I'll tell him to his face. _Scarecrow's hands migrated from his shoulders upwards, snaking through Jonathan's hair to rinse it. _I don't want to upset you, and it's not fair to drag you into the middle of this in the first place._

Having his other half's fingers running over his scalp felt nice enough that it almost distracted him from the issue at hand. _And this sudden change of heart came about because why?_

_Because when you're happy, I'm happy too._

That got him to stay silent, contemplating. Scarecrow was an idiot much of the time, and reckless, quick to bring up the worst points in any scenario Jonathan got them into while ignoring the flaws in his own. He'd abandoned Jonathan twice, once cutting off any contact between them and leaving his alter ego absolutely alone. But he was still Jonathan's other half. He was still the only one who had protected Jonathan from birth onwards, save for a few lapses, and the only one to ever unconditionally love him and forgive him for his stupid mistakes. He knew Jonathan's every secret and flaw, and despite all the shortcomings, he'd never left him for good, or come to hate him.

Jonathan couldn't express in words how much he loved and depended on Scarecrow, for all of that. It wasn't a need; it was more than that, something deep and sacred that no one else could touch, or come between. No one, not even Batman, meant more to him than that. _I'll be careful._

_And I'll be quiet._

_Scarecrow? _The water, which had seemed warm and inviting once again during that conversation, seemed to be slipping back to a cooler temperature. He couldn't tell if it was his own imagination, sparked by worry, or if he'd just been in the shower long enough to waste all the hot water.

_Yeah?_

_Why…what do you think Vicki Vale would be calling him about?_

Scarecrow shook his head. _Forget I said anything. I don't want to come between you._

_But—_

_Really. Look, I'm sure you're right, and there's a perfectly logical explanation for why he's receiving calls from her at home. Probably an interview, or something like that. I mean, you'd think they would call his office for that sort of thing, but maybe not. Or she's got a thing for him that he doesn't know about. It's not as if he's going to choose some redheaded, reckless idiot over you._

Jonathan didn't know much about dating, outside of the times his patients or coworkers had mentioned their relationships, or books and films, but from the latter, he was fairly sure that men fell for redheaded, reckless women often. And also that this conversation wasn't reassuring him in the least.

He shut off the water, taking a towel from the rack as he stepped onto the floor mat. The mirror was steamed over, but he could see just enough of himself to be reassured that the neck of the sweater was covering the bruises again. Jonathan considered wiping a section of the glass to make absolutely certain, but decided in the end that the fact that the butler hadn't broken down the door and dragged him back to Arkham yet was miraculous enough, and he wasn't about to risk that position by streaking mirrors.

Batman was sitting on the bed again when Jonathan unlocked the door and stepped into the bedroom. He had a towel in hand and had been the process of drying his hair, but upon seeing the Bat, his hands stopped working, body fully occupied with controlling the churning in his stomach. The conflict from the shower was back, and with a vengeance.

It didn't go unnoticed by Batman, though he guessed the source of the stress incorrectly. "You're not going back to Arkham. I explained things to Alfred, so don't worry. He's fine with it."

If it wasn't such an outright lie, Jonathan might have felt reassured. "He was not fine with it." He sat on the end of the bed, towel draped over his legs. Scarecrow had scoffed, so faintly Jonathan would have missed it had there been any background noise, but he didn't speak.

The Bat sighed. Not from annoyance, but fatigue. "Okay, so he didn't take it as well as I would have hoped."

Jonathan could have told him that from the butler's expression in the doorway. Apparently, Batman was an optimist, at least relatively. It was less surprising than he might have expected a few months ago.

"But he's still recognizing it as my decision," the Bat went on, "despite his own feelings on it. He's not happy with the situation—"

Going by Batman's expression, the butler was furious with the situation.

"—But he's not going to interfere."

"Bruce?"

"Yes?"

He pulled at the fibers of fabric on the towel anxiously, ignoring the water dripping down his neck. "I—" Direct. He had to be direct, or they would never get anywhere. "Why did Vicki Vale call?"

Batman looked lost for a second or so, as if he didn't remember the call. Then his expression changed, becoming somehow more understanding, though still confused. "No idea." A pause, then, "She might have been checking up on me. I left about a few seconds after she gave me the twins' address last night."

"_She _gave that to you?" That made absolutely no sense. Why would Vicki Vale know where the Joker was hiding? And why wouldn't she have reported that information to GCN about ten seconds after learning it? Besides waiting around to give Bruce information Jonathan hadn't been able to provide. That bitch.

"She didn't know," he said quickly, possibly because Jonathan was making no attempt to hide his dismayed expression. "That was the apartment she got into, after she watched me get stabbed. Vicki never saw the Joker. I only put it together when she mentioned the twins by name."

They were on a first name basis. Fuck. "Why does she have your cell phone number?"

He seemed bewildered as ever. Jonathan couldn't tell if it was an act. "She probably got it from Veronica or one of the other girls. Why?"

Girls. He had _girls._ In the plural. Bruce Wayne's manwhorish ways had never really bothered him—just another thing to be disgusted over—until now. Now, Jonathan wanted nothing more than to take all of those girls and give them a concentrated dose of his toxin. "Nothing," he managed. "Never mind."

There was a light to Batman's eyes, and he moved forward on the bed so that they were beside each other. "Jonathan, I'm not interested in her. You didn't think I was, did you?"

"No," he muttered, pulling the towel over his head as his face flamed.

Bruce's hands went over his, warm and secure as always, and moving the towel slowly back and forth to dry his hair. "She's pretty. But she's not you."

His cheeks were burning more than ever when Scarecrow took control to speak.

* * *

"But she's pretty?"

The hands beneath Bruce's tensed, the nervous stammer gone from Jonathan's voice. It was flat, and different from before, not in pitch or tone, but somehow in the underlying quality. He raised his head, met Bruce's eyes.

"Scarecrow."

"She's pretty," he repeated. He sounded as he had the first time Jonathan had gone outside; like a snake that could strike at any second but was, at least for the moment, content to rest and simply watch its prey scurry around.

_Is he jealous on Jonathan's behalf? _Or his own? Bruce had never considered the possibility that Scarecrow would be jealous. Or that Scarecrow felt anything beyond hatred for him. He'd never considered what to do about his girlfriends now that he was committed to someone either. It was sure to be problematic, especially with someone as excitable as Jonathan. "Yes." He hoped he sounded disinterested. Vicki was pretty, true, and more than that. Determined, and, when she wasn't letting her stubbornness override common sense, intelligent. The exact sort of woman he'd have interest in pursuing if he was not otherwise attached. "But she's not close to me the way Jonathan is. She doesn't understand the double life."

"Are you going to sleep with her?"

It took him a few seconds more than it should have to respond, not because he was considering it, but because the question was unexpected and blunt enough to throw him off balance. Speaking with Scarecrow felt about like fighting with the Joker, off-putting and audacious. "No. I don't sleep with people I have no interest in pursuing a serious relationship with."

"But you have frivolous relationships," Scarecrow countered instantaneously. Bruce was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded of the way Rachel had fired off questions in court, on the times he'd observed her. "You're on the news every week with a new girl on your arm."

"I—" He couldn't promise not to. It wasn't as if he could take Jonathan out and show him off, or let anyone know of his presence at the manor. And if a billionaire playboy suddenly ditched the playboy part of the job description, it would draw suspicion like flies to honey. "I promise that I'll do that as little as possible. And I won't get emotionally attached."

Scarecrow gave him a look that one might give something unpleasant that someone had stepped in and tracked all over the floor. "Right. I'm sure you don't feel anything for the supermodels hanging off of you."

"If I didn't have lasting relationships when I was unattached, why would I have them now?"

"Well, you're obviously into thrill-seeking." He said thrill-seeking the way others would say child molestation. "And I would argue that your lack of a relationship is due to your inability to commit based on your obsession with your, ah, night job, and not a lack of interest. Which is hardly reassuring."

Damn, he was good at finding and digging into every flaw. The Joker had been skilled at that as well. The more Bruce saw of the Scarecrow, the more similar they seemed. "I thought Jonathan was the psychiatrist."

"Was." His eyes flamed. "Until you came along and ruined things. As far as I can see, you have a habit of doing that, and I'm _not _letting it happen again."

In spite of himself, Bruce felt a sudden pity for…whatever Scarecrow was. A hallucination. An imaginary friend given voice. An other half, as Jonathan called him. His concern was apparently genuine, and given everything that Jonathan Crane had been through in the past few years, such a hatred for Batman was arguably rational. "I'm not going to hurt him. I won't do something like the Joker did. You have my word on that."

"The only brain damage the Joker gave him was psychological," Scarecrow spat, looking contemptuous. But there was a worry under the hate, faint as it was, and it_ was_ faint. Bruce would have missed it altogether, had he not be reading Jonathan for a while now.

He realized that his hands were moving again on the towel, drying, and that Scarecrow was making no move to stop him, though he continued to glare. Maybe he'd misjudged this…voice. He was misguided, that much was certain, and he caused Jonathan as much pain as he claimed to protect from, but his fear was genuine. Maybe, in a way, he wasn't so different than Jonathan had been at the start of their interactions, and he was simply more cautious in opening back up.

After the traumatic experience with the Joker, Bruce couldn't say he blamed him.

On impulse, he moved his hands under the towel, slowly, cradling either side of Scarecrow's face. And then, not so slowly, he leaned in and brought their lips together. For a second or so, it was exactly like kissing Jonathan.

After those seconds, though, Scarecrow bit down—_hard_—on his lip.

It would seem he _hadn't _been wrong in his initial assessment, then. And that he really should have learned from experience, having been bitten by Jonathan once before, during the attack on Arkham last Halloween. Eyes watering in pain, he tried pulling away, but Scarecrow's jaws were clamped tight enough to draw blood, with no signs of loosening. Pushing at the man did nothing to dislodge him either, and Bruce had to stop for fear of losing his lip. He acted on impulse, doing the thing that had last stopped such an attack by bringing his hand across Scarecrow's face.

It was Scarecrow who had bit him, though he didn't know if it was out of shock or malice. It was Scarecrow that had resisted the first two attempts at removal. It was Scarecrow that he'd lashed out at, without considering the consequences.

But it was Jonathan staring up at him from the floor, holding a hand over the side of his face that had been hit. And judging from his heartbroken expression, Scarecrow had relinquished control just in time for it to be Jonathan that Bruce had hit.


	85. Said and Done

AN: The bad news is, the hard drive on my laptop is damaged and not working. The good news is, I'm still under warranty and Dell's already sent a new one, so I'll have the laptop up and running as soon as it shows up. As for my delay before the breakage-ness, sorry about that. Wednesday morning, I had stomach cramps so badly that I actually fell over and started yelling in pain, completely incapable of walking back to my dorm from work and taking the ibuprofen I'd forgotten to take before I left. The people I collapsed in front of (to whom I later gave a thank you card for putting up with all of this) ending up calling the campus police, simply because they couldn't think of anyone else who could transport me back to my dorm, and I didn't have my cell phone on me, so I couldn't call anyone. They showed up as well as the paramedics, who were adamant in trying to get me to a hospital, which I refused, because I knew I didn't have appendicitis and because hospitals cost money. I ended up getting a ride back in a police car (Sadly, I was feeling too crappy and too not willing to risk arrest by rolling down the window and hanging out of it like a dog). The point is that this problem mostly disappeared as soon as I got some pain medicine, but it never fully went away, and after that, my writing motivation was rather sapped.

Thanks for the reviews, and your patience!

* * *

Jonathan made no move to get off of the floor. He remained on the carpet with his hand still clamped to the side of his face, as though that would protect it from the damage already done. He was crying, but not as Bruce would have expected. Silently, with his eyes still wide and staring, looking more shocked and betrayed than sorrowful. Sprawled on the floor, he'd yet to so much as shift to a more natural position, his only moves being to cover his face and to put the other hand on the carpet behind him, for support.

"You hit me."

"I didn't mean t—I'm sorry." _Goddamn him. _That would have been Scarecrow's motivation all along, to try and prove to Jonathan that Bruce didn't care by tricking him into something like this. And Bruce had walked right into the bastard's trap, in the most obvious way. It wasn't as if biting was a new weapon in the arsenal. Christ. If only he knew of a drug that would permanently silence the voice in his partner's head while keeping Jonathan from grieving the so-called loss. _Bastard. _"Please don't cry."

"I'm not crying," Jonathan said, as if there weren't tears coursing down his cheeks. "You _hit _me."

_Damn it. _Someone rational would have viewed it as a reflexive action—a _stupid _one, but reflexive nonetheless—to protect from pain, from having his lip torn off. It was still bleeding; he could taste coppery blood in his mouth and feel warmth on his chin, see the stain it was making on his shirt when he looked down. He probably looked wild, rabid, from the blood, and he hardly thought that would help the situation. A rational person might have looked at the injury and realized exactly why he had lashed out. But Jonathan, for all his brilliance, was not a rational person, and Bruce doubted he would take an attack on the voice in his head any better than he'd take an attack on himself. "I didn't mean to do that," he said slowly, carefully enunciating despite the pain that moving his lips caused. "I was only trying to make Scarecrow let go. He was _hurting _me."

"You kissed him." Spoken as though that made it all right. Well, not quite; the conflict was visible, playing over Jonathan's features as an outward projection of inner turmoil, but Scarecrow had the advantages of access to Jonathan's innermost thoughts and the fact that he was an auditory hallucination whose very purpose seemed to be to destroy chances at happiness. "He hates you."

"And that justifies trying to tear my skin off?" _Calm. Stay calm. _But he couldn't. His darker side was too angry, too disgusted, with himself for being stupid enough to try that without realizing all the things that could and had gone horribly wrong, with the Scarecrow for blindingly obvious reasons, and with Jonathan, for defending him, for refusing to admit or even entertain the possibility that the voice in his head was out to hurt him. Hurt them both.

"I didn't say it was acceptable. Neither was _hitting _me." Jonathan slowly removed his hand from his face, with all the trepidation of a morgue worker pulling back a sheet so the corpse beneath could be identified. The vague form of Bruce's hand was imprinted there, like a brand, and the tears sliding down his cheek highlighted the contrast in color, making it all the more evident. "I don't care if you meant for it to hurt or not, Batman. It did_._"

_Batman. _Hell. So he'd gone back to thinking of Bruce as a monster that quickly. "I'm sorry."

"You should be." He didn't sound outraged, but there was anger in his tone, amidst grief and confusion, and so many other emotions, layered together so subtly that they were almost imperceptible. Bruce wanted to get on the floor beside him, hold him, saying something, anything, that would reassure him that he _did _regret that action more than words could express, even if Scarecrow had been begging for it. To say the thing that would make Jonathan understand he was being sincere, that this wasn't like his experiences with the Joker. But he couldn't find the words, and moving, silently or not, would only agitate him more.

Jonathan stood up, moving backward toward the door as he did. He was still crying, though his expression was otherwise guarded.

"Jonathan, wait—"

"I would like to be alone right now." His stature and expression gave the impression that he was trying to sound forceful, sure of himself, but the shake in his voice betrayed him. "Don't follow me."

And then he was gone.

Bruce was left sitting on the bed, at a loss for how to react. He wiped at his mouth with the back of one hand and the hand came back bloodied, the stain on his skin staring up at him like an accusation. It occurred to him that this could very well be the end of things. Jonathan had trust issues as it was—they both did—and now Bruce had hurt him. The fact that he'd been injured as well was irrelevant, because Jonathan would almost certainly not see it in those terms. He'd only see it as another person willing to take his trust and violate it.

_This might be for the best._

It was his Batman side that said it, but Bruce found that part of him agreed. Jonathan Crane was a criminal. And even if he could be kept from crime, the fact remained that he was sick. He wasn't getting help here, and should Bruce find a way to have him treated in secret, without being recommitted, he would still be a fugitive, unable to show his face in public. Asking him to live under an assumed name would be asking for too much, and even if Jonathan didn't mind it, the voice in his head would. He needed to go back to Arkham. This latest interaction had all but cemented that. This relationship was self-destructive, and stubborn as both partners were, Bruce couldn't envision that changing any time in the near future. Ending things now, if he was being objective, would be the better decision in the long run.

But he didn't _want _to. Just as he hadn't wanted to say no when Jonathan had made his feelings known. Yes, it was selfish. And when all was said and done, it was far more likely to damage the both of them, but it was a risk he wanted to take. He hadn't felt so strongly for anyone since Rachel had been murdered, and any bit of happiness, masochistic and dangerous as it was, was better than letting the chance slip through his fingers again.

If only there was some way of ensuring that, should things go badly, Jonathan wouldn't be the one to get burned.

* * *

Jonathan wasn't crying.

Scarecrow hadn't shut the emotional link, or the mental one. He hadn't needed to. He'd withdrawn, when he realized what the consequences of the bite would be, deep inside their mind. Deeply enough that the pain didn't register. He'd stayed close enough to the surface while Jonathan argued with the Batman to be aware of the world outside, and listen to their conversation, but he'd retreated further as soon as Jonathan had walked out of the Bat's bedroom, before he could make his feelings toward Scarecrow know.

He was too deeply hidden for Jonathan to sense, open links or not. Scarecrow was hiding at an almost subconscious level, able to feel only Jonathan's emotions and physical sensations, and his other half would have to come to this level to speak with or feel him. Jonathan was far too distraught to do that.

But he also wasn't crying. Scarecrow could feel Jonathan's actions just as he could feel his emotions, and while Jonathan felt the tears sliding from his eyes and down his stinging face—and was, it would seem, to conflicted to take note of them—he wasn't the one crying.

Scarecrow was.

Except that he didn't cry. Not ever.

He hadn't planned on that, the biting. Honestly, he _hadn't_. He'd wanted to come out, yes, to talk, to twist the conversation the way he wanted, the way he was able to do so easily with ordinary people, people who weren't clowns or bats, and catch the Batman in a contradiction, make him let something—_anything_—slip, something that would reveal him for the scum he was and make Jonathan see the light, or wonder, at the very least. Something that would keep them safe.

But then the Bat's hands had been on his face and it had felt so good that despite himself he hadn't reacted though he ought to have been pulling away, screaming, doing anything he could to get free instead of sitting there, intrigued, until the moment the Batman's lips had pressed against his and it had felt _good, _like kissing the Joker only better, because while the Joker had passion he'd had a horrible taste, and for a split second Scarecrow had been _content _with it, with letting this man take his trust, and then he'd panicked and bit down, hard as he could, remembering Halloween night and how the Bat had released him in pain, and he'd only wanted to get free, not even thinking of the agony he was inflicting, though he might have enjoyed it otherwise, but the Batman's blood was filling his mouth, suddenly, as if he'd bitten into to rotting fruit, and he was terrified of what the response would be and suffocating, as Jonathan had suffocating when his great-grandmother had forced him under water so many, many times, and all he could think to do was run before the Bat could catch him.

And Jonathan had been hit.

The tears were still coming and he couldn't make them stop.

Jonathan was not supposed to get hurt. Jonathan was _never _supposed to get hurt. It had been one thing when they were children, when Scarecrow hadn't been able to function independently and Jonathan had forced him to the side when things got terrible, refusing to let him suffer because Jonathan was just that selfless. There, he'd had no choice but to sit on the sidelines, and it had hurt like hell. But things were different now. He could push Jonathan to the side as easily as he'd been pushed, and he had no excuse for keeping himself from suffering the consequences.

It was bad enough that he'd run away when the Joker did things, like slicing Jonathan's skin open or beating him half to death. The disappearance when Jonathan had agreed to flush the pills had been different; it had been to prove a point, teach a lesson. Remind Jonathan that he couldn't be brushed aside. But this…he'd let Jonathan get hurt when he had every opportunity to suffer the pain himself and no reason not to. This was _wrong._

He _existed _to keep Jonathan safe. Jonathan might not remember the day Scarecrow was born, but he did, and he knew well enough that his very purpose in life was to _protect _Jonathan, keep him safe from everything in the world that would hurt him and provide the comfort that no one else was willing to give. Destroying the Batman was secondary. Putting an end to this "romance" had always been about protecting Jonathan.

But he hadn't done that. He'd _inflicted _pain instead, by running away. He wasn't supposed to show weakness. He was a protector, and that wasn't what a protector did. Protectors kept their charges safe, as he'd failed to do.

And, as if as a reminder of that failure, he still couldn't force the tears to stop.

* * *

Jonathan never thought he'd find himself longing for the Joker's advice.

Scarecrow was hiding—likely for the best, because Jonathan was _furious _with him, even if he understood the motivation—somewhere deep within, almost too deep to be sensed, and he had no idea where Bruce was. He hadn't followed Jonathan, that much was certain, though Jonathan couldn't tell if that made him grateful or only upset him more.

He found himself longing for a conversation with anyone who wasn't a part of the madness. Jonathan had never thought he'd see the day when he considered the Joker to fit such a qualification, under any circumstances. Then again, it didn't have to be the Joker. It could be Harley, or Nigma, or any of his friends. He'd be willing to open up to _Leland _at this point.

_He hit me._

Not that he hadn't hit before. Batman had hit him the last time he'd tried biting, after all, and numerous times besides that. But it was different when the Kevlar and cowl was on. There, it was almost like a job. A horrifying job, one that Jonathan disagreed with entirely, but something distanced. Jonathan had always taken it personally, but he'd never considered if the Bat felt the same way. He'd assumed it was about stopping crime or more likely thrill-seeking, but not something that involved genuine hurt the way it did on Jonathan's side.

Even if it did, this was still different.

It wasn't even that he couldn't understand why Batman had done it. Scarecrow had completely overreacted, though Batman shouldn't have been stupid enough to kiss a man who'd never expressed anything but contempt for him in the first place. And there had been so much blood. He'd have hit too, under such an attack, but that wasn't the point.

He didn't know _what_ the point was. Just that, fair or not, he held Batman to a higher standard than himself, and that "not hitting" and "not scaring my other half" were a part of that standard. The Joker had hit. He'd hit, and he'd "apologized," done nice things afterwards to make up for it, or justified it without every conceding that he'd been in the wrong. What the Bat had done seemed different than that.

But Jonathan knew from experience that he was a terrible judge of character when it came to relationships.

It hadn't even been two hours yet, since they'd both confessed their feelings for each other. Less than a hundred and twenty minutes, and all this had happened.

Maybe this wasn't meant to work out, after all.

_But I want it to._ Even if it ended with him in the ICU, as it had with the Joker.

There was a gentle knock on the bedroom door, followed by an equal gentle voice. "Jonathan? Can we talk?"

He tried to put aside all his misgivings, and almost succeeded. "Come in."


	86. One Step at a Time

AN: Steve lives! Yes, my laptop is named Steve. Yes, I am in the habit of naming inanimate objects—usually some sort of electronic technology—such as the laptop and my cell phone (HAL). And yes, their names are all either nerdy references or in-jokes. Shut up. My laptop and I are almost never separated. It only makes sense for him to have a name.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan didn't get up to open the door. It seemed subservient, somehow, as if turning the door knob would invalidate his position. It wasn't fear of being hit again—he understood why he'd been hit, despite his feelings on the matter—but it would be a concession. It would be making himself the submissive member of the discussion. Jonathan wasn't entirely sure _what _he wanted from this conversation, or even how he felt about what had transpired, but he knew for certain that he didn't want to give up ground.

They'd been together for less than a day now, and the relationship had already become a struggle of wills. Jonathan might have come up with a sarcastic comment on the situation, if he wasn't miserable.

It only occurred to him after Batman stepped inside that he was still sitting on the bed, which was just as subservient of a position as opening the door. _Brilliant. _Jonathan supposed that getting up now would hardly be inconspicuous. "Yes?" It came out colder than he'd intended.

"Can we talk?"

He didn't point out that Batman had already asked that. The Bat lingered near the doorway, as if he expected to be bitten once again. His face was flushed, making the blood on his lips that had persisted, even after he'd wiped his face, look all the more vivid. Jonathan felt a rush of guilt, though he hadn't inflicted the damage. "I suppose we should."

"I'm sorry." The words came out with the force of a gunshot, and Batman paused after them, mouth working without sound. Apparently, he hadn't planned anything past the apology. "I—I really didn't mean to hurt—I just reacted without—I'm sorry, Jonathan."

He waited for Scarecrow to chime in, either with a detailed and sarcastic critique that tore the words to shreds or simply a dismissive and just as sarcastic remark. There was only silence. In retrospect, he might be withdrawn too deeply to hear the conversation, or to make audible commentaries. So Jonathan was alone for this, lacking the half of his mind that had been able to detect when the Joker was lying, or manipulating Jonathan's emotions. Part of him—most of him—wanted to forgive Bruce then and there. But part of him remembered all too well the damage the Joker had inflicted, and refused to risk going through that suffering again. "You should be."

Batman flinched. The sense of guilt grew. Jonathan was protecting himself, avoiding the trap of trust that he'd fallen into with the Clown Prince of Crime. It was the sensible thing to do, and the safe one. So why did it feel so god-awful? "I didn't mean to hurt you. Please don't cry."

"I'm not crying." Distress was different from tears, and he didn't appreciate the implication that he lacked the control necessary to keep himself from sobbing. It made him sound irrational, as if his feelings were less valid because he was upset about being backhanded.

"I'm sorry," Batman repeated, as if Jonathan hadn't spoken. "What can I do to make it up to you?"

_That _was disturbingly familiar, enough to make his blood run cold. The Bat was Bruce Wayne, true, and Bruce Wayne must be used to placating people with money or otherwise, but "making it up to you" sounded less about resolving the issue, and more about sidestepping it altogether in favor of a bribe. He'd experienced that more than once with the Joker. The physical gratification to offset the humiliation and trickery, the nice behavior to make up for the poisoning, and the horse to make up for the attempted murder, among other things. He would _not _fall for that again. "You can't. You—you can't just give me something, or give me some privilege, and make up for everything like that."

"That's not what I—"

"You _hit _me," Jonathan continued, determined to get his thoughts out while they were flowing in a logical progression, no matter what explanation Batman had been about to give. "Whether or not you meant to, you still did. You violated my trust—I don't _care _if it was unintentional—" he added, holding up a hand to silence the Bat as the man opened his mouth to speak, "You still did, and that's not something you can regain by giving me a…a cookie or something. It's not that easy."

"I wouldn't bribe you with cookies." Batman blinked, mouth somewhat open even between words. "I—I'm not trying to bribe you at all, but I wouldn't use cookies. Not even Alfred's."

Despite his best efforts otherwise, Jonathan felt the corners of his mouth twitch momentarily upward.

"But really." He looked sincere. Jonathan only wished he could read the Bat well enough to tell for sure. "I wasn't trying to win you over. I want us to be able to trust each other."

"So do I." Though it was starting to look impossible. "But—look, I can't just brush all my concerns aside. I c_an't_. It isn't that simple."

"I didn't expect it to be." Batman shifted his weight, looking like he might step forward. Then shifted back, deciding against it. Jonathan felt relief, and then disgust with himself for being alleviated at the fact that the man he felt so intensely for was keeping his distance. If his romances with Batman or Joker were anything to go by, then relationships were nothing but a chain of unpleasant events interspersed with happier moments that managed to hold the chain together until a particularly awful link snapped it.

At times like these, it was very hard to remember why he'd wanted either of the clown or the Bat to return his affections in the first place. Jonathan felt tears in his eyes, despite his efforts otherwise. They appeared instantly, as if they'd been there all along. "I don't know what to do," he admitted, staring down at the bedspread, waiting for his eyes to clear.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Batman move closer to the bed. Not closely enough to be uncomfortable—he kept enough of a distance that Jonathan's fingers wouldn't have so much as grazed against him if he outstretched his arm—but closer. It felt comforting, if he didn't analyze it. "Can we take it one step at a time?"

Jonathan raised his head. For a second, it felt as if the tears had worked their way out of his eyes and started down his face, but as he focused on the Bat's words, he no longer felt them at all. "What?"

"One step at a time. I won't expect you to trust me right away, and you…" he hesitated. Jonathan couldn't tell if he was working out what to say or rather, how to say it. "You won't expect me to override my reflexive actions overnight. I'm sorry that I hit you, Jonathan. And if I could take it back I would, but I can't, and—" Batman swallowed. "The fact of the matter is that when I'm being attacked, my first instinct is to get away, no matter what it takes. I _need _that. It's what keeps me from being killed when I go out at night."

_Easier said than done, _Jonathan thought, imagining what Scarecrow would think of all this when he came to, but he nodded. He wasn't going to attack the Bat—though he could hardly speak for his other half—and he understood why he'd been hit. Understanding wasn't the problem. Trusting was.

"But," Batman continued, running a hand through his hair and looking as tired as he did whenever he got back at four or so in the morning, "I _will _try to change those reactions, if you—or Scarecrow—is the one doing it. It's going to take time, I'm sure, probably for both of us." He waited for a nod of assent, continued. "But I still think it's worth the effort."

"I—" He thought of all the ways this could go wrong, and how badly he wanted it to go right. "I do too."

"Okay. Good." Batman extended his hand by an inch or so, withdrew it. "Do you want to get lunch?"

* * *

The walk to the kitchen was silent.

Jonathan was still crying, quietly, but near constantly. The fact that he denied it worried Bruce just as much as the shattered trust he'd have to rebuild, which, knowing his partner, was going to be a long, arduous process. It wasn't as if Jonathan didn't have a habit of denying the overwhelmingly obvious—claiming that he wanted to be left alone while following Bruce like a lost puppy, for example, or insisting that he was fine when he was sobbing—but he hadn't done that since he'd made his feelings known. True, that had been less than three hours ago, but Bruce had assumed that laying himself open—and it didn't get much more open than confessing his love and nearly grinding up against the object of his affections—might have shut down whatever mental filter it was that made him contradict the readily apparent.

As if it was going to be that easy to overcome psychosis. He needed to be hospitalized again, for so many reasons, but Bruce couldn't bring himself to do that. Selfish to the point of conscienceless, maybe, but true.

It wasn't as if Arkham had a good track record with any of the villains in the first place. Not that that had any bearing on his decision, but a half-assed justification was better than nothing. In theory, at least.

Bruce still felt apprehension at the thought of changing his responses—or even reducing the speed at which he reacted—to keep Jonathan from being hurt. It wasn't that he wanted Scarecrow to suffer—the absolute last thing he wanted was to do any more damage, mentally or physically—but speed and force were essential to keeping himself alive. He might not be going out now, not until the stitches were gone, but when he did, he _needed _to be reflexive.

Though Scarecrow was unlikely to try a physical attack again—at least, not biting—so maybe he wouldn't have to alter those reflexes.

Which begged the question of what he _would _try next. The chemicals in the household were as securely locked away as the weapons, even the laundry detergent, so there was no chance of Draino being slipped into the food. The computers remained password protected, and the cell phones stayed with Alfred and Bruce at all times. Communication was just as blocked off as weaponry, but Bruce knew better than most that anything could be turned into a weapon, especially in times of desperation.

Besides, Jonathan had been a brilliant psychiatrist, madness aside, and the voice in his head might not need a weapon to inflict damage.

Alfred, thankfully, was not in the kitchen. Useful as his advice was, Bruce didn't want to have a discussion with his surrogate father about how to fix a relationship after he'd traumatized his boyfriend an hour or so in. Especially after the arguments they'd had earlier in the day. Besides, Jonathan hadn't taken a liking to Alfred, and there was no love lost from the other side of the connection either.

He cleared his throat, to avoid catching Jonathan off guard when he spoke. "Do you want anything in particular?"

Jonathan shook his head, looking at everything in the kitchen besides Bruce. He'd moved closer during the walk here than Bruce would have expected, shortening the three feet between them to only a foot or so, but he'd yet to make eye contact. It was disturbing similar to the period of his captivity when he'd followed Bruce everywhere, and even held his hand, without acknowledging his presence aloud or visually.

"All right." He went to retrieve the dishes before he bothered to search through the refrigerator. The cabinet that held the breakable ceramics—which Bruce had tried out of habit—was, to his surprise, unlocked. The plate had a slick feel to it, as though it had been washed but not thoroughly dried. Alfred must have done the dishes after the argument in the master bedroom, and if he'd been put out enough not to totally dry them and to neglect locking the cabinet afterward—Alfred would take the time to be absolutely thorough about housework even during a nuclear holocaust—then he must be _furious_ about this. _Great. _He shifted the plate to the other hand, and took another, turning to face Jonathan.

Bruce was once again unnerved by how calm Jonathan looked in proportion to the amount of tears that were streaming down his face, as if his tear ducts were working overtime and he wasn't actually distraught at all. "Here you go. Careful, it's—"

That was as far as he got before the plate slipped between their fingers, shattering on the tile below.

Jonathan went rigid, unmoving. A glance down revealed what Bruce had feared—his partner had no shoes, only socks—but the socks were light in color, and showed no signs of blood, at least not yet. He wasn't cut, at least. "Do you think you can step back without—"

Jonathan inhaled sharply, stepped backwards. He was still crying, but his expression was no longer incongruously calm; eyes wide, mouth twitching. "Don't."

Not for the first time today, Bruce felt panic. "Jonathan?" No reply. "Jonathan, it's all right. That was my fault, I should have—"

"Don't cut—I'm sorry. Don't cut him. It was my fault. Don't." He wasn't looking at Bruce, or even the shards on the floor. He was staring off into space, and Bruce got the distinct feeling that whoever he was talking to was not in the room.

"Jonathan?"

Jonathan stepped back again, and, finding himself up against the refrigerator, slumped down like a marionette with the strings released, until he was sitting on the floor. Bruce stared, and began to move toward him before realizing with a start that the expression, vacant and disturbed as it was, wasn't Jonathan's.

"Scarecrow?"

* * *

AN: Considering that some of my readers probably haven't read my fic _Act Like We Are Fools_, and those who have probably last read it in December, and thus wouldn't remember anyway, I feel compelled to clarify a point: There's a chapter in ALWAF where Scarecrow breaks a plate over the Joker's head, and the Joker then cuts Jonathan with the shards as punishment.


	87. Music

AN: Last night I got recruited to be a part of a friend's music video class assignment (the song being Jonathan Coulton's "I Feel Fantastic," which I recommend if you haven't heard) in which I was to play the part of the "pretty girl that I met at the pharmacy." The actual filming involved a lot of running around between pharmacies and supermarkets, none of which would allow us to film inside for legal purposes, until they ended up cutting the scene entirely and just returning me to my dorm. So yeah. After that, my writing ability kind of died.

In other news, I just saw a news clip featuring Senator Patrick Leahy and I was absolutely unable to focus on anything he said because my mind was too busy going "It's that guy who talked back to the Joker at Harvey's fundraiser!" I'm such a dork.

So, after this chapter, I'll more than likely have a thousand reviews. And that, my friends and greatly appreciated readers, is the most awesome thing ever. I cannot begin to express how grateful I am, not only that you're all leaving comments, but that you've been reading my writing for so long. I'd have never gotten eighty-seven chapters into this (let alone published nine stories) without the feedback from everyone on this site. You people are wonderful.

* * *

"Don't." Scarecrow wrapped his arms tightly around himself, hands clenched as fiercely on the sleeves as Bruce might hold the cable of a grappling hook. "It was my fault. I'm sorry." His eyes were still staring off toward the part of the linoleum littered with ceramic shards, and Bruce couldn't tell if they were focused on something that wasn't there, or not focused at all. He was still crying—though less than before; Bruce was horribly reminded of how the Joker had "calmed down" by dissociating—and shivering, legs sprawled on the floor where he'd fallen. He made no move to get into a more comfortable position, and Bruce highly doubted he was aware of how he was sitting at the moment, anyway.

"Scarecrow." At the very least, he still had facial expression. The Joker's mental breakdown had been signified by a lack of reaction to anything at all, both silent and stoic. Not that the Joker's experience spoke for everyone—applying his responses as the norm for anything was just plain stupid—but Bruce chose to take the hope that thought gave, even if it was superficial. "You're all right. I'm not angry."

He didn't answer. Bruce hadn't expected him to. It was obvious that whoever he was speaking to didn't exist in the room at the moment, and that something about the plate breaking had either sparked a traumatic memory or a nightmarish hallucination, and neither was something that Bruce was equipped to handle. It was different from the psychosis that followed a lapse in medication. Jonathan hadn't blocked out the real word during those moments; only merged it with the images his mind created. He had still seen Bruce, albeit through a distorted filter, and still heard the things that were said to him.

Scarecrow didn't seem to perceive his actual surroundings at all.

"I'm sorry. Don't cut him. My fault. Hurt me." His voice sounded the way Jonathan's had during the last bout of madness, quiet with an odd, almost sing song cadence, though the inflections were in all the wrong places. "Don't."

Bruce stepped around the slivers of the plate, knelt down a foot or so in front of Scarecrow. Watching the man's face, he waved a hand slowly back and forth, in and out of eye level. Scarecrow's eyes didn't follow it. There wasn't so much as a flicker to suggest that they'd registered the stimuli. _Shit._

"I'm sorry."

"It's all right," he said, knowing full well that Scarecrow couldn't hear it, but at a loss for anything else to say. Bruce extended his hand, bringing it slowly toward the man's foot, the closest part of his body. Should Scarecrow react violently to the touch, kicking would be difficult and slowed by the position he was sitting in, and Bruce was far enough from his arms to be safe from the first onslaught of punching or scratching, at least. He doubted Scarecrow would react violently, or even feel it.

_It would be better if he did. _At least it would be a sign that he was acknowledging the outside world. Or it could pull him back to it, with any luck. _Unless snapping him out of it frightens him more. Damn it. _Bruce had no idea how to handle this without making things worse. He wasn't a psychiatrist. He had no idea how to help a mental patient, particularly one as far gone from reality as Jonathan Crane. And he definitely had no idea how to help the _voice in Jonathan's head._

His fingers grazed over a sock—the fabric still unmarked by blood; at the very least, he hadn't been cut—as softly as Bruce gauged he could touch before the contact became too light to feel. Scarecrow shivered, but he'd been shivering periodically since this fit had started. Whether or not he'd actually felt it was left to interpretation, something Bruce doubted he had the time to sit and puzzle out. "Scarecrow. Can you stand, or do you need help getting up?"

"No. Don't cut. I'm sorry. Don't. Hurt me."

_That's a no. _Moving was as risky as touching him, but for all Bruce's lack of experience in treating trauma flashbacks, he imagining that getting Scarecrow away from the trigger of the incident could help. At the very least, it shouldn't make things worse. "I'm going to pick you up. All right? I won't hurt you."

Bruce moved closer, sliding one arm under Scarecrow's knees and keeping a hand on his back for support. He stood, slowly, careful to move back from the refrigerator and countertops, to keep from accidentally slamming Scarecrow into something and traumatizing him all over again. Another shiver, and the man leaned forward as if trying to bring his knees to his chest from his current position, but other than that he remained the same. Hands clutching his sleeves for dear life, and muttering. "Don't."

"I've got you. You're okay." He turned so that they were facing away from the plate, began a walk to the doorway, as quickly as he could without jostling Scarecrow.

"I'm sorry."

_I'm going to have to clean the plate up. _He could only imagine what would happen if Alfred happened across it, and discovered how the situation had escalated from there. He'd be on the phone with Arkham, making up some excuse as to why Jonathan was there, before Bruce would have time to realize that Alfred had noticed at all. Not that he could take the time to attend to it now. He had to find a way to bring Scarecrow around, a way that wouldn't end violently. _I'll get it once he stops being crazy. If that ever happens._

By the time they reached the guest bedroom, Scarecrow had quieted, going from muttering continuously to speaking every thirty seconds or so. The same phrases, but they'd slowed. That could be a sign that he was waking up, or that he was retreating deeper within himself. Either way, it did little to lessen Bruce's own fear.

He lay Scarecrow down on the bed, stood for a moment, watching. The man lay on his side in the manner that he'd sat, nearly in the fetal position, unmoving and unblinking. "Hurt me."

_Hell._ Bruce turned away, glancing at the boxes on the opposite side of the room, crossing towards them. Jonathan had held the stuffed bear for comfort the last time he'd lost contact with reality—even if seeing it once he'd come to had infuriated him—and if he had something of his own to console him, it might be all the more effective. Hopefully. The first two boxes contained clothing. Bruce moved on, searching for something, anything with the slightest chance of working.

The search was fruitless for the next few boxes. Jonathan's belongings tended to be in accordance with his interests—the main ones being science and traumatizing people—and neither of those was of any use in calming a person down. Most of his books that Bruce was familiar with were of the horror variety, and those that weren't still weren't the type of thing people read to cheer themselves up. He didn't take the time to glance through the ones he hadn't heard of. He could hear Scarecrow's intermittent mutterings from the bed, serving to remind that he might not have much time left. He doubted the psychology texts would be any more cathartic, considering the aspects of psychology Jonathan was so intrigued with.

Besides, given how Jonathan reacted to things like water and broken plates, there was no telling what responses even the innocuous-looking novels could provoke.

The next box contained the CDs, intermixed with DVDs, and it was the one that gave Bruce pause. Jonathan's musical tastes leaned towards the classical, and while classical music wasn't always relaxing—one only needed to hear "Dies Irae" or "Night on Bald Mountain" to know that—it could be soothing, provided that the right composer and music was used. He lifted a Beethoven CD from the box, scanning the song list on the back.

There was no CD player in the room.

"Scarecrow?" Bruce stood, knees popping, and slid the case into his back pocket. "We're going to the living room, all right?"

"I'm sorry."

His condition hadn't changed, and remained stable for the walk to the room with the nearest sound system, where they'd watched Bond films together. Where Jonathan had zoned out talking to the voice inside his head, and returned distrustful. Where Scarecrow had briefly pretended to be Jonathan, before making his identity and his distrust known. And to think that Bruce had once considered things like that to be serious problems in the relationship. They were nothing compared to this, barely worthy of concern.

He sat Scarecrow on the couch, this time, sitting himself after he'd switched the system on and placed the CD inside.

"Don't hurt him."

"It's all right," Bruce said, though it wasn't, wrapping an arm around Scarecrow's shoulders. To his surprise, the man did react this time, leaning against Bruce, and sliding his hands from his own sleeves to Bruce's shirt, clinging just as tightly. The opening sounds of "Für Elise" drifted through the room.

"Scarecrow?"

"Don't cut."

How long they remained that way, Bruce wasn't sure. The room was dark, as he'd neglected to turn on the lights when he came in—too many other things to worry about—and Scarecrow's—or Jonathan's, it really belonged to Jonathan—body was warm against his own. He could feel Scarecrow's breath on his shoulder, softly, through the shirt, a steady pattern only broken in the moments the man paused to whisper fearfully. It seemed to him as the music played that the time between the whispers was growing, but he was too far back from the system to read the time, and there wasn't a clock anywhere else in the room.

Anyway, he was more than a bit distracted by their physical proximity to focus on the time. Not sexually; for all the ways Bruce was willing to admit he deviated from the norm—the Batman thing, among others—being sexually attracted to traumatized, almost unconscious people was not one of them. There was nothing sexual about this. It was…comfortable. If not for Jonathan's current mental state, Bruce would be willing to fall asleep on the couch, just like this.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd sat with someone like this. So closely, so intimately. It must have been Rachel, but he found that he couldn't even bring to mind the last time he'd sat with her. It hadn't been long before her death, but the time leading up to that was a blur, after all the chaos. It could have been the night before she'd been murdered, after they'd kissed. Or months before that.

Jonathan had almost killed her, before the Joker had finished the job. Bruce ought to hate him for that. He realized, thinking about it, that part of him was still angry. Furious. Not just for what had happened to Rachel, but the damage Jonathan had done to everyone else. His patients, the city, and Bruce himself. He imagined that Jonathan felt the same way about Batman. It seemed to be all Scarecrow felt.

But the hate couldn't cancel out his pity for the broken man leaning against him. And it couldn't cancel out the odd sense of friendship, and attraction. Rather, it was subdued by them.

He hoped Jonathan felt that as well.

There was a sensation of movement, on his shoulders, the feel of the fabric over them gently moving. Bruce looked down, realizing as he did that Scarecrow had moved even closer against him than before, and watched the man's thin fingers trace along the fabric in a circular, aimless pattern. The muttering had stopped completely, and Bruce couldn't believe that he hadn't noticed it before.

Especially considering that it had been replaced by humming, along with the music.

"Feeling better?"

He raised his head, smiling, frowning, then smiling again. "Bruce?"

Jonathan's hair, despite the cut, still had bangs long enough to hang in his eyes. Bruce brushed them back, smiling with relief. "Do you want to watch a movie or something?"

Jonathan blinked, his expression suggesting that he had no idea what had transpired before he'd woken up on the couch, and further suggesting that he didn't care. The tears had finally stopped altogether. "Yes."

"Good." He grudgingly moved out of Jonathan's hold, stood. "I need to go clean something up. Pick whatever you want to watch, and I'll be back in a few minutes."

"Okay."

He began the walk back to the kitchen, reflecting on what he'd seen. Jonathan hadn't been the one to raise his head. It had been Scarecrow, and in the second before he'd frowned and faded, he'd looked genuinely comforted. Genuinely happy.


	88. Birth

AN: Rather than share my thoughts on the whole "_New Moon _breaking TDK's midnight record" thing in words, I instead offer this wonderful piece of art that I happened upon: i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ Shrimp_and_Champagne_by_L16. jpg Now back to your regularly scheduled fic.

For those who are familiar with the comic backstory for Jonathan and haven't read my earlier works, I know his mom wasn't around in the comics, but I've written her as there but neglectful, as a result of artistic license/not knowing the full backstory at the time. And also, _Buffy the Vampire Slayer _is a far, far better show than I've made it out to sound. It's amazing.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"So…this Buffy girl's mentor has a vampire living with him, and he hates him."

"Yes." Jonathan stared at the screen, interest as captivated by the images as it had been when they'd watched the Bond films. This time around, though, he was far quieter, rapt with attention from the moment the episode had begun, aside from when he spoke to explain the main characters and the basic storyline. Whether he was less critical of his own shows, or he'd analyzed it before, Bruce wasn't sure. He was preoccupied himself with trying to work out just why a show with "vampire slayer" in the title didn't seem to be slaying the vampires.

"And the vampire hates him back?"

"Uh-huh." There was no sign of annoyance on Jonathan's features, though given that he'd yet to look at Bruce since hitting "play," that was probably because he was only half-listening, attention focused on the television.

"Why doesn't he go somewhere else?"

"He can't. Spike's been the subject of government experimentation, and now he can't hurt people without suffering crippling pain. He can't defend himself, so he's stuck with them."

If someone had told him, a few months ago, that he'd end up romantically involved with Jonathan Crane and watching supernatural nineties' television shows with him on DVD, Bruce would have suggested that person undergo an evaluation at Arkham. There was so much wrong with this. And yet, in the moments when it wasn't falling apart, it felt so right, provided he didn't think on it for too long. "And you started with the fourth season because?"

"First of all, this is the episode where everyone loses their voice, so the plot's easy to follow even if you're unfamiliar with it." It occurred to Bruce that Jonathan was sitting beside him, closely enough that they were almost touching. "And secondly, the first season has things like praying mantis demons that disguise themselves as substitute teachers for the purpose of luring male students to their homes, to mate with them and then rip their heads off."

Bruce stared, which Jonathan seemed to sense without turning his head.

"It got better as it progressed. Be grateful I didn't skip ahead to season six and start with the musical episode."

The plate had still been lying in pieces on the kitchen floor when Bruce returned to clean it up, with Alfred nowhere in the vicinity. Bruce chose to take that as a sign that the incident had passed unnoticed, because if the butler had seen it, or got any gist of what had just transpired, he'd have been on the phone with Arkham Asylum in minutes, or would have dragged Jonathan back himself, kicking and screaming aside.

Well, knowing Alfred, he'd have forgone the kicking and screaming by knocking Jonathan out.

Method aside, none of that had happened, which was how Bruce found himself on the couch again, trying to figure out why anyone would let a vampire, safe or not, into the house, what little girls singing creepy nursery rhymes had to do with vampire slaying, and just what Wheetabix was. And, more importantly than any of that, whether or not Jonathan was trusting him again.

He wasn't keeping his distance anymore, but he wasn't making physical contact either. Bruce was almost tempted to reach out and touch him, softly, only for a second, to see how he'd react. He'd looked confused when he'd come to, lying against Bruce on the couch, but he'd also smiled, without panicking or trying to pull away. Of the two, Scarecrow had been the one with the negative reaction, and even his was subdued. Bruce was still trying to work that one out, discern when Scarecrow had gone from biting to the point of drawing blood to snuggling until his presence was noticed.

So not only was he in a relationship with a certified madman who had tried to kill him on more than one occasion, now he was concerned with the neuroses of the imaginary person in his boyfriend's head. Bruce couldn't begin to imagine the field day a relationship counselor would have with this information. It was a shame that actually going to one would result in Jonathan being recommitted, and Bruce arrested, prosecuted, and likely thrown into Arkham himself. It was a shame, really. He certainly could have used the help, figuring out what would and wouldn't set his partner off.

Touching him, or rather, being the one to initiate contact, seemed likely to do that, the more Bruce considered it. It was one thing to come to being held. Presumably, he'd been conscious while Scarecrow was in control, so he would have realized he was being touched before he had power over the body. But he was highly focused on the television at the moment. Sure, he responded to Bruce's voice, but that was auditory stimuli. If he suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder that he hadn't seen coming, it could serve as an unintended reminder to earlier, when he'd been hit. _And that can't lead anywhere good._ No, Jonathan should have the opportunity to make the first move. If he wanted to. Considering how suddenly his moods and views changed—particularly with Scarecrow whispering in his ear about everything—he might never want to again.

Assuming that Scarecrow was still against this. Bruce was at a loss for why he'd stayed in that position upon regaining consciousness, unless he was coming around. But that…it had taken weeks to bring Jonathan around to even _civil _terms, despite the fact that Jonathan had been dependent, hallucinating, and clinging to Bruce for dear life before that. They said things were easier the second time around, but for someone presumably just as paranoid as his alter ego, to move from almost tearing Bruce's lip off to snuggling against him in the space of an hour…that was just too much of a stretch. Still, he was at a loss for anything else to explain it.

_Unless it's an attempt to lower my defenses so he can try something like that again._

No, he would let Jonathan decide when the physical contact would start back up. And just hope that it did. Why was it that every time they had anything close to progress, something else came along and knocked them back to square one? It was a miracle they weren't still as hostile as they'd been when Jonathan had first regained his sanity.

Bruce shook his head and tried to turn his mind back toward the plot. "Who is that?"

"Willow. She's Buffy's best friend. And a witch."

He nodded, deciding that this would all make much more sense if he didn't keep zoning out. Probably.

* * *

This was unacceptable.

Absolutely unacceptable. There was something wrong with this manor. There had to be. He couldn't pinpoint what it was, but there was something dark here, twisted. Like Arkham Asylum. Gotham City was rotten all over, but there were areas where it was concentrated, thicker. Arkham was one of those places, a desolate place entirely devoid of hope, considering how low the success rates were, and how many employees had either been killed, left town, or gone mad.

One wouldn't think a place so lovely and relatively safe as the Palisades would be home to another such concentration. But Wayne Manor was pure evil. It had to be.

Scarecrow wasn't prone to superstition, but the malevolent energy of Gotham couldn't be plainer unless it was visible, glowing, and hovering right over everyone's heads. Something was wrong with the city, and something was especially wrong with this mansion. It was like walking past fun house mirrors, but instead of distorting his vision, they twisted his judgment, making it grotesque, unnatural. Completely unlike the decisions he would make if he wasn't see things through a twisted glass.

There was no other explanation for showing the Batman affection. None.

Coming to, at least, he'd had the excuse of not knowing where he was. His mind was pinned between the realization that there was music, quiet and soothing, with someone warm and strong holding him tight, and the nightmarish images that had arrived with the sound of breaking china, the sight of the Joker grabbing their hair and dragging Jonathan forward, caressing his skin with the broken piece of plate before slicing through the flesh. Another moment he'd failed Jonathan by hiding, afraid of the consequence. He'd thought—hoped—maybe the Joker wouldn't hurt Jonathan, since Scarecrow had been the one to hit him, initiating the fight. It hadn't worked. He'd failed Jonathan.

It had been impossible, in that state, to realize that what he was seeing, over and over and over again, wasn't actually happening. And that terrified him, almost as much as it had terrified him to awaken comfortably in the Batman's arms, content to sit there, humming, _smiling_, before he'd realized what was going on. He wasn't the one who'd been poisoned with the toxin, and deprived of the antidote. He wasn't the one who fell victim to the hallucinations that plagued them without the antipsychotics. Scarecrow was the one who held what remained of their sanity.

And he wasn't the one foolish enough to trust the Bat.

But it had felt _good_, disgusted as he was to even think it. That was why he hadn't pulled away, not at first. It wasn't even the right _kind _of good. Scarecrow had never surfaced to be held by the Joker, or hugged. He wasn't the one to move closer to the clown at night. Scarecrow had come out when the sexual tension had reached unbearable levels, and when he arrived, he pushed the limits. Jonathan wanted things gentle; Scarecrow wanted them passionate.

Why was it that everything seemed to have gone upside down?

Part of him _wanted _what Jonathan had right now. Wanted to be sitting on that couch, talking. _Talking. _With or without the Bat's damn hands on him. Part of him was falling victim to the same tricks that had snared Jonathan. They had to be tricks. _Had _to be. He'd broken Jonathan's mind, taken his career, his respect, his license. Jonathan might be willing to forgive that. Scarecrow never could.

That was why he _existed. _To be the unchanging rock Jonathan could steady himself on. To keep him safe, and provide the comfort that no one else did. That no one else ever _could_, because if they did, Scarecrow would become obsolete. That was why he'd been born in the first place.

Jonathan didn't remember Scarecrow's birth. As far as he was concerned, his other half had always been there, like the mental equivalent of a conjoined twin or some sort of accompaniment to his birth that had never let go. A spiritual umbilical cord, that led to an immaterial brother in place of a mother. Someone who had always existed and would always exist, no matter what the circumstances. It was an inspiring image, a romantic idea, to be sure, like something from a fairy tale. Scarecrow wished it were true. It would make life easier.

It wasn't.

He remembered his birth perfectly, though the circumstances leading up to it were harder to bring to mind. Not surprising, given that Jonathan had been three or four at the time. They'd been outside, that much was certain. At least, Jonathan had, and his mother. The events before that moment were vague. Jonathan's great-grandmother might have done something, though she hadn't started her more sadistic disciplines until they were older. There could have been spanking involved. Or maybe he'd just been lonely, or upset for reasons known only to him, that he was too young to articulate. Whatever had happened, his mother had been outside, and he'd gone to her, seeking comfort. Too little to understand that he would be brushed away, as always. And he was.

She'd wandered off, leaving Jonathan alone. Scarecrow remembered stirring, as Jonathan turned his head, at first following his mother, before his eyes fell on the scarecrow. And he'd thought, in whatever half-fluent, inarticulate way that a toddler could think, that the scarecrow, immobile and inanimate, was the only thing resembling a person in his life that couldn't leave him. It hung from the pole, day after day, unmoving. Unchanging. Dependable. And it was the closest thing to a friend that he had, though it never acknowledged him. For Jonathan, that was par for the course.

And that had signaled Scarecrow's first action, a hug. One that Jonathan imagined, to replace the one his mother would never give. It had been Jonathan's imagination then, and it had been Jonathan's imagination for years to come, until childhood abuse had pushed the space between them, made Scarecrow more material. Not much; like a wisp of vapor gaining the consistency of a snowflake. It wasn't until the toxin that he'd become something substantial, and it wasn't until the Joker had pushed them even wider that he'd become solid, necessary.

But even something solid could be broken down. Or melted away, back to vapor. Or further, to nothing at all. It all came down to necessity. Use it or lose it. Jonathan _needed _him. He did. For all his alter ego's brilliance, he had no street smarts or common sense, and he _needed _Scarecrow to provide that. Much as he needed him to give the unchanging affection that no one else could provide.

But if Jonathan found someone else to fill that niche, someone material, who could hold him and love him and do everything that Scarecrow couldn't, the Scarecrow became obsolete.

He didn't trust the Batman. Honestly. He _couldn't_, not after all the suffering his other half had gone through at the man's hands. But if he was going to be truthful, that was secondary. Protecting Jonathan came first, always, unless his own existence was threatened. And this relationship threatened it. It was different with the Joker. It had been impossible for someone so unpredictable, so erratic and selfish, to satisfy Jonathan's needs, to make him feel completely safe and loved. Here, there was stability, nonsensical as that was. And with it came the threat of replacement.

Scarecrow didn't want anything to hurt Jonathan. More than that, he didn't want to disappear. And if that meant costing them a relationship, so be it. But that relationship _was _progressing, despite his attempts to stop it, and Scarecrow was stuck watching. And praying that he wouldn't fade away with Jonathan's reservations.


	89. Reassurance

AN: Remember when I said my subconscious was taunting me with dreams that almost contained the Joker but not quite? Well, the other day I actually had one containing everyone's favorite homicidal clown, and woke up right after I had it, thinking "I should really write this down before I forget it." Unfortunately, this occurred around five in the morning, and I fell back asleep almost immediately afterwards, and now all I can remember is that the Joker was in it and so were his Rottweilers. That dream-amnesia thing really sucks sometimes.

In story-related information, the good news is that I've finally got the rest of the story planned out (I tend not to plan, so much as have an idea of the beginning, end, and a few of the middle bits) which should help with the writer's block that's been plaguing me for the past few chapters. The bad news is that Thanksgiving Break starts tomorrow. Still, I'll try writing whenever I have the time.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"Here."

Bruce looked up from the magazine he'd been flipping through—a painfully vapid gossip rag, one of several that he forced himself to read in order to see how his social façades were keeping up—to find a piece of paper dangling a few inches from his face. Given the size of the sheet and the logo toward the top, partially obscured by Jonathan's hand, it appeared to have come from a memo pad, probably from one of the hotels he owned. "What is that?"

"My letter to Harley."

He'd forgotten about that, sometime during the biting, slapping, fighting mess that had begun almost as soon as Jonathan had returned from the shower. With a twinge of guilt—at least it was still early in the day, before Arkham had probably received its mail, much less sorted it—Bruce took the paper. Jonathan had written on both sides, covering every inch of space that wasn't marked by the Hylands logo. He'd pressed thickly enough with the pen to raise the text on the opposite sides. "You could have asked for a bigger piece of paper, you know."

"I didn't want to bother you. You looked so enthralled in—" Jonathan tilted his head, readjusting his sliding glasses as he glanced over the cover. "Exes Tell All? Any of your former flames?" There was a low note to his voice that was either amused or sulky, and either way, it was entirely too appealing. Mental patients, Bruce decided, were the adult equivalent of jailbait. Not that jailbait had even been a temptation for him.

"No." For once. "They seem to be targeting the ladies this month." He scanned the letter. It would seem that the stereotype of doctors with bad handwriting carried over to psychiatrists as well, because the text was as illegible as it was small. The thick cross-outs below even smaller text, where Jonathan had decided to rephrase himself, didn't help. Bruce extended his opposite hand to the nightstand, lifting the laptop. "You know what? Why don't you type it out?"

"So they won't recognize my handwriting?"

_That, and I can't read it. _"I want to email it. I don't type all that fast, so it'll get to her quicker if you do it."

Jonathan's brows furrowed, as Bruce typed the laptop's password. "But I don't know Harley's email—"

"I know. But I know Lucius's."

Another tilt of the head, leaving Jonathan looking less curious and more tipped off balance. "Who?"

"Lucius Fox." The desktop background came up, and he handed the laptop to Jonathan. From the man's position, Bruce could still see the screen, and at this point, he trusted his partner not to try anything, anyway. Scarecrow was the uncontrolled variable, and he was skilled enough at noting the difference by now that he'd be able to tell if the other half surfaced to try something. "He's the CEO of Wayne Enterprises."

A flicker of recognition graced Jonathan's features, as he opened the word processor.

"I can't drive the letter to Arkham myself. Not after I told Alfred I wouldn't leave the house, and I doubt he's in the mood to run errands for me." To put it lightly. "But Lucius can send someone to do it, and he's closer to the Narrows. She'll get it today, unlike if I put it in the mailbox."

There was a hand over his, squeezing softly. Only for a number of seconds, but considering that it was the first physical contact between after the hit earlier in the morning, it seemed so much longer. Jonathan's hand retreated before Bruce could return the hold, fingers flying across the keyboard. "Won't he be at all suspicious that you're sending letters to Arkham Asylum?" A pause. "Presumably under someone else's name?"

"He also knows about the Batman thing." He'd never considered it, but there was so much of his world Jonathan knew nothing about. Jonathan's life was far less private, his daily activities and conversations catalogued and filed by Arkham—at least, whenever he was in the asylum—and his criminal actions laid open by reporters and court stenographers. Still, Bruce was willing to bet that he was every bit as ignorant towards certain facets of Jonathan's world as the man was to his. The Scarecrow thing proved that. Would they ever truly understand each other? Did any couple?

One of Jonathan's brows arched minutely, before the ghost of a smile spread over his mouth. "I'd ask if the moral quandary troubled him, but CEOs aren't much known for ethics."

Bruce's own smile gave the slightest falter. "Lucius isn't like that."

Jonathan shrugged, resumed typing.

It was more than a bit depressing, that the man was so quick to think the worst of people. Oh well. There was a time and a place to address his issues—a time and a place that Bruce had yet to find—and it wasn't when they were still readjusting to each other after Scarecrow's interaction. "Anyway, he'd refuse to participate in anything that went against his beliefs. He has before."

Another small smile. "Idealist."

"More of a realist who doesn't like compromising his morals. He does help me with the suit and the Tumbler and all of that."

Jonathan's eyes brightened as if someone had flipped a light switch. "That's where you get all those…things?"

He looked so surprised at the revelation that Bruce couldn't help but smile. "Wayne Enterprises does specialize in military surveillance and technology. At least, part of it." Looking back, it was a miracle that no one had ever put two and two together before Coleman Reese had looked into Applied Sciences. Though most Gothamites didn't get a close look at his equipment. "Where did you think I got all of that?"

"Foreign contractors that didn't speak English and were given a life of luxurious retirement on a private island once they were through?"

Bruce laughed, realizing only halfway through that Jonathan might take it as an insult. He clamped a hand over his mouth, but Jonathan carried on typing. If he was annoyed, he hid it well, and hiding things well wasn't his strong suit. Well, he'd done a good job of hiding Scarecrow, but when that had fallen apart, it had fallen hard. "The only things I get overseas are raw materials and the parts for the cowl," he explained, trying to remove all traces of a smile from his face. "I handle the combat and the detective work, for the most part, and Lucius handles the gadgetry, chemicals, and all."

Turning his head, Jonathan gave Bruce a questioning glance, still typing. "Is he the one that counteracted my compound?"

_Hell. _He'd just had to be clueless enough to steer the discussion there, hadn't he? _Way to go, Bruce. Way to dig into old wounds._ There were times when he almost wished he had a "Batman" in the same manner that Jonathan had a Scarecrow, if only to interject before he said such stupid things. All he had was the dark side of his psyche that wanted to beat the hell out of people, and object to Jonathan's mere presence. Hardly helpful.

There was no point in lying. He'd be found out, somewhere down the road if not immediately—Jonathan was a few clicks away from a Google search—and putting any more strain on their trust was asking for this to end badly. "Yes."

There was a pause of only ten seconds or so, that managed nonetheless to be excruciatingly long, in which Jonathan stopped writing. Neither of them spoke, or looked at each other. It ended when Jonathan snapped his head back to the screen, typing furiously.

_Great. _Bruce cast about for a safe topic of conversation, wondering as he did if it might not be better to abandon conversation all together. His eyes fell on Jonathan's fingers, still flitting over the keys. "You really worry about her, don't you?"

He cocked his head without turning, in what Bruce guessed was confusion, before straightening again. His pace has slowed; still rapid, but he wasn't hammering on the keyboard any longer. "She's my best friend." He twitched, almost imperceptibly, shook his head. "Second best, at least. The first material person to really care about me."

_Material person. _So he counted Scarecrow as his best friend. It was as disheartening as it was twistedly logical. "The first ever?" He'd been thirty when he met her, or close. The files at Arkham were scant when it came to his life before his Arkham employment and later imprisonment. How drenched in misery must that life have been?

"The first to move beyond a professional acquaintanceship or a friendship of convenience, yes." Another halt in his typing, but Bruce wasn't sure that it was intentional. Or that Jonathan had even noticed it. "She—before she went insane—was one of the very few staff members actually concerned with helping her patients."

"I'm sure she's all right," he offered, not mentioning his own views on Harleen Quinzel's psychiatric skills. From what he'd seen and heard of her, her heart had been in the right place—though she'd been overly ambitious, and it had burned her in the end—but falling in love with a patient and breaking him—and Jonathan—out was about the furthest from helpful she could have gotten. The Joker was a master manipulator, true, but she'd been over her head the second she stepped into his cell, and she should have had some inkling of that.

Then again, for all Bruce knew, he was just as over his head here. _Judge not lest you be judged_. "She has her friends to support her, and the doctors—"

"The doctors there at present couldn't treat a patient with a level three defense mechanism, let alone someone with a severe codependent personality disorder. She'd be better off with faith healing."

He nodded, pretending he had the slightest clue what a level three defense mechanism was. "It's okay." Bracing himself for a hostile or frightened retaliation, he put his hand on Jonathan's shoulder, slowly and lightly. He'd have preferred to touch Jonathan's hand—that was where he'd been touched, which indicated that the man was comfortable with such contact—but he was still typing the letter, and Bruce doubted he'd appreciate the interruption. "She'll get this today. Tomorrow at the latest. And I keep a watch on the hospital; I'd know if something bad had happened to her." True, he hadn't been looking into the details of her—or any of the patients'—therapy sessions, but something as major as self-injury or a suicide attempt would have made his radar.

"It's still going to crush her." He'd tensed when Bruce put his hand down, but he hadn't stopped typing. His posture was relaxing now, with Bruce's hand still in place. "I didn't let her know. How I knew that he was all right. How could I? What would I say, 'he took me off to visit the Batman, and not you?'"

"Maybe he has visited her." He rubbed Jonathan's back in a circular motion, as Scarecrow had done with his fingertips on Bruce's shoulders. "I mean, now that he's out of traction, he could have—"

"He hasn't," Jonathan said flatly, fingers stopping. Bruce wasn't sure if he'd finished the letter, or couldn't bring himself to go on. "Do you know what he said, when he broke me out to make the laughing gas and he didn't take her? That he didn't need her in this plan. If he visited her, it would mean he needed her. It would mean he'd take her out. He hasn't, so he hasn't bothered to make his presence known." He brought his hands up, ran them through his hair.

"She'll know now."

"I should have thought of it _before _now." Jonathan shook his head, expression pained. "I shouldn't have forgotten her like this. It was bad enough t-that I went with him when he abandoned her, and all the terrible things I did afterward—"

Bruce knew full well what terrible things he was referring to. He was surprised to find that it hurt _him _to think about, now that their own unlikely relationship had begun. He could only imagine what the memory did to Jonathan, between the emotional and physical trauma, and his guilt over betraying his friend. Bruce didn't want him to have to dwell on it, so he leaned in, gently turning Jonathan's head to face him, and kissed him on the lips. It was brief, closemouthed, less than a second, and he tensed, expecting Jonathan to pull away. But Jonathan leaned back in instead, kissing again and deepening it.

This time, there was no biting, and Bruce found it infinitely more enjoyable that way.

* * *

AN: A level three defense mechanism is a neurotic (yet common among adults) way of handling a problem. Examples include displacement, rationalization, and repression.

Here's a useless fact: I seem to write faster when listening to Lady Gaga's music. I suppose I should invest in one of her CDs.


	90. Laundry

AN: So upon returning home for Thanksgiving, I found that my sister had to spend the break working on a "tiger survival kit" for one of her classes, because they had to do, as her professor put it, make "something interesting" with tigers. It includes a mask to be worn on the back of your head, so the tiger won't know where you're looking, and tiger butter, both to eat and to intimidate the tigers with. I knew my awesome strangeness ran in the family. Compared to that, the fact that I've spent the past few days reading aloud random stories from _Struwwelpeter _seems perfectly ordinary.

In other news, I just found out that my wisdom teeth removal has been scheduled to take place three days before Christmas. Oh well. Maybe lying around in misery will be conducive to writing, since it's not as if I'll be able to go have holiday fun.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Jonathan opened his eyes to find himself lying against Batman. There was no clock in his immediate line of sight—he wasn't sure if the one he'd smashed against the Bat's head had ever been replaced, anyway—and he didn't feel like raising his head to look for one. Instead, he glanced at the window. The curtains were thick, and drawn, but not completely. Through the small gap between the drapes, there was faint sunlight, pinkish, as with the early morning or the sunset.

He blinked, almost sitting up before he decided against rousing his partner. _How long have I been asleep?_ For that matter, when had they fallen asleep? His mind was still hazed by sleep, the events of yesterday—if it had been yesterday—a blur. Batman had sent the letter to his toxin-countering CEO—the recollection of that person made Jonathan grit his teeth—and then they'd gone to eat lunch. Batman had insisted on using paper plates, for whatever reason, and after that they'd returned to the master bedroom, watched the news. Nothing Joker-related, nothing of real interest. Just the stories, robberies and murders and all the little things that Jonathan could tell hurt the Bat, because he wasn't out there to stop them.

So he'd distracted him again, with conversation. Pleasant conversation, for once, though Jonathan was still at a loss for precisely what it had revolved around. It must have gone on for hours, because then they'd had dinner, and carried on talking—it occurred to Jonathan as he blinked sleep from his eyes that they'd talked about many things, which would explain the difficulty bringing them to mind—until they'd falling asleep, like this. And if it had gone on long enough to have dinner, then the light outside must be the morning.

_I never sleep that long. _And usually, the longer he slept, the more likely the nightmares. With a rush of apprehension, Jonathan glanced at his companion. Still sleeping, Batman's expression was serene, eyes free of dark circles. So he hadn't started screaming. Or at least, hadn't woken the Bat if he had. The nightmares had seemed fewer as of late. Probably because most of the dreams focused on Batman, and now that the two of them were making out with each other, the terror was rather diminished.

Careful not to wake Batman, Jonathan slid off of the bed, moving quietly across the carpet and into the hall. It wasn't until he'd reached the guest bathroom, where his hairbrush and toothpaste and everything else was held, that Scarecrow spoke up.

_

* * *

_

Jonathan?

_Yes?_

Scarecrow paused, at a loss for words. He needed to say something. Something clever, detrimental to the relationship without sounding detrimental. Something that would make Jonathan doubt the Bat's intentions, and for a long time, unlike the half hour or so of worry over Vicki Vale. Jonathan had been so…_content_ yesterday, so happy. As he'd been with the Joker, before the abandonment and the rib-shattering, but more than that. Closer, without the ever present threat of being dumped into a blood-filled bath or felt up on camera. It was one of the rare times in their lives that Jonathan was truly happy. One of the rare times in their lives that Scarecrow had been in serious fear for his life. He needed to say something to destroy that trust, even if it hurt Jonathan. Or both of them. Something. Anything. He just had no idea what.

_I—what's going to happen to us in the long term?_

A moment of silence. From Jonathan's side there came no worry. Only confusion. _What do you mean?_

_I mean that you can't go out with him. Not in public, unless you're in disguise. And he can't pay off a psychiatrist to come here and declare you sane without being arrested for harboring you. At the very least, it would cause a media circus. _He was making it up as he went along, but to his surprise, it was actually working. _I mean, I know you don't like people all that well, or being in public, but are you going to be happy spending your life locked up in here?_

Jonathan shifted his weight, averting his eyes from the place Scarecrow would be standing, were they separate. _I thought you weren't going to do this anymore._

Damn. He'd been hoping Jonathan had forgotten the "no more trying to destroy your happiness" promise after all the events of yesterday. _Old habits die hard. _When Jonathan failed to smile, he went on. _I'm sorry. Just…I want you to be happy. Can you be happy like that?_

_I trust Batman. _His tone wasn't hostile, but Scarecrow could sense the emotions. Jonathan was on edge, angry at having the agreement broken and fighting back the worry that had sprung up at his alter ego's question. _I know you don't, but—look, despite everything, he's a good person. He'll find a way around all this. I trust him._

Scarecrow was thankful that he'd closed off his side of the emotional link, so that Jonathan couldn't perceive all the negative feelings flooding him. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair. Here he was, faced with _nonexistence, _with the threat that his entire life could be snuffed out, like a candle, and Jonathan refused to hear a word against the man holding the extinguisher. What was he supposed to do, tell his alter ego that _he _was the bad one?

_Though, actually…_No. No, absolutely not. He was not going to make Jonathan the monster here, even if it cost him his life. He was still torn, emotionally, from the things he'd called Jonathan when he'd lost his temper after his other half had made his existence known to the Bat. He refused to…to mindrape Jonathan that way. No.

Shaking his head, Scarecrow closed his eyes. A barrage of memories flooded over him as he did, most of them from his dreams: awakening in the darkened hall closet, and thinking he _had _ceased to exist, Jonathan's old teddy bear, lying rotted on the floor. The times in college when his voice had been reduced to little more than a whisper, or after the poisoning, when Jonathan had tried to completely shut him out. Harley gone demonic and the decomposing Joker. He shuddered, involuntarily, stomach churning as if he was about to be sick, opened his eyes. _Jonathan?_

_What is it? _The question started harsh, but softened at the end. Perhaps he'd caught the tension in Scarecrow's tone.

_I'm sorry. I shouldn't have questioned you._

_It's all right. _Definitely softer. _Just…please give Batman a chance. He's not like the Joker. I know I'm a bad judge of character, but really. He's not like that. I'm not asking you to trust him. Just…try. Please._

His nausea had increased, if anything. _I…maybe you're right._

Jonathan didn't have to say anything to make his incredulity plain. _You're serious?_

A shrug. _I'm not about to welcome him with open arms. But he does seem to care about you, despite the experiments you conducted. If he's willing to overlook that, he might not be completely evil._

He felt Jonathan's rush of anxiety, and he hated himself for it.

* * *

Jonathan tried to recall the last time he'd spoken to Batman about his experiments.

He couldn't remember when that was. They'd argued about it, before they became friends, with Jonathan—rightfully—arguing that the ends justified the means, since the toxin would help humanity in the long run, and with Batman arguing that they had been sadistic torture. The closest he'd ever come to having a civil discussion on the issue was the time they'd discussed his tendency of introducing phobias in his landlords to get out of paying the rent, and that had been a while ago. As far as he knew, Batman still objected to it.

Bending moral values in relationships was one thing. The libido and pheromones tended to override common sense. But stopping "crimes" like Jonathan's was not something he could picture the Bat compromising on.

_Jonathan. Jonathan, relax. He's still with you, isn't he? Aside from the biting, the first day went fine._

His heartbeat quickened. Scarecrow might have meant it to be comforting, but the reminder that they'd only been together for a day didn't help in the slightest. He wasn't a relationship counselor, and his main focus of study had been psychopharmacology, but he knew what a "honeymoon phase" was. The period at a start of a relationship where the couple was willing to ignore each other's flaws. But overlooking what annoyed one in a partner didn't make the problem disappear. Not at all. What happened when Batman realized the gravity of his decision?

And it wasn't just the experiments. It was everything. His contempt for people, his refusal to accept the Bat's idiotic suggestion that he had a mental illness, beyond what the brain damage had caused. Scarecrow. If he didn't like Scarecrow, how was he supposed to get along with Jonathan? And his butler's disapproval, the fact that this was all illegal…the list went on and on. Jonathan struggled to hold in the craving to wretch.

Scarecrow's hands were on his shoulders. _It'll be all right._

_What if it isn't?! _He brought his own hands to his lips, only remembering as he made contact that he had almost no nails to bite. _How can he lower his morals that much? He can't accept an asylum escapee, not forever, not one who tests chemical warfare on patients and let his own grandmother have a heart attack without calling for—_

He didn't notice the butler until he'd almost walked into him. He hadn't even been aware that he was walking, until that point. _Shit. _He offered a half-mumbled "Um. Hello?" before realizing that it would have been in his best interests to stay silent.

It was hard to describe the look the butler gave him, paused in the hallway, laundry basket in his hands. There was strong, strong dislike, of course—though the expression was too subdued for Jonathan to be sure if that loathing was all out hatred—but there was also a control to it, beyond the usual stiff upper lip. Whether he was simply good at keeping his temper in check, or whether he'd realized that Jonathan wasn't exactly a skilled seducer who'd taken advantage of the poor, defenseless Bruce Wayne, Jonathan had no idea. "Was there something you wanted, Dr. Crane?" His tone implied that, if there was, he wouldn't be fetching it.

Jonathan shook his head, blushing. He felt compelled to say something, offer some apology, though he hadn't done a thing wrong. Bruce wouldn't want them on bad terms, and anyway, if he did stay once the "honeymoon period" was over, it was in both of their best interests not to be outwardly hateful or frightened. "I—"

"Dr. Crane, I'm only going to say this once, so let me make myself perfectly clear."

He swallowed, hard.

"If I had my way, you would be back in the asylum at this very moment, and you would have been back there the instant I discovered you were in the cave."

Jonathan felt anger, in spite of his self-preservation skills. They rarely functioned when needed, anyway. "I didn't ask to be brought here."

"You haven't asked to leave, either."

"Have you ever been inside Arkham?"

"You nearly killed Ms. Dawes." The flash of anger in the man's eyes was so sudden and great that Jonathan almost felt sorry for poisoning that meddlesome woman. "Master Wayne may be willing to overlook that, but I'm not, and I'm not about to turn a blind eye to all the dangers you pose to this household."

Something softened inside Jonathan, despite the defensiveness and indignation. There wasn't just anger in the butler's expression. There had been a flash of concern in his eyes as well, worry over all that could happen to Batman. Understanding that didn't make the anger any less, but it did make it more tangible, sensible. "I don't want to hurt Bruce. I—not anymore. I don't want anything to happen to him. I want him to be happy."

"As do I." It was as if the sudden flash of insight had depleted Jonathan's usual ability to read people. The butler's look was unfathomable as he pushed the laundry basket into Jonathan's arms. "And if you want to make me happy, you'll take that to the master bedroom."

Jonathan did the only thing he could think of: stared. "_That _would make you happy?"

"No," said the butler, already walking off. Jonathan couldn't tell what had changed between them. If anything had changed. He doubted it had. More than likely, it was a way of ending the conversation and getting out of dealing with Batman at the same time. They'd argued. Jonathan hadn't heard any shouting during his shower, but that didn't mean it wasn't a nasty fight.

The butler needn't have worried, because Jonathan entered the bedroom to find Batman still sleeping on the bed. Jonathan felt a flash of jealousy, staring at his smooth, peaceful features, before he shook his head and opened the closet door. He'd last been in here during his search for clothes similar to the Joker's, after the clown had suffered a psychotic break and stopped responding to the rest of the world. Rummaging through the chest of drawers and the closet and taught him that the more casual things lay in the drawers, while the suit coats and pants—the items that sat on top in the basket—hung in the closet.

He flipped the switch with his elbow and stepped inside, glancing around. When last he'd been here, he'd informed Batman that the closet was bigger than his apartment, and that was hardly an exaggeration. The closet was arranged by both clothing item and color—darks on one side, lights on the other, patterns and ties in the back. The top item was a tie, so he strode to the far left corner, moved to set the basket down as he placed the clothing on hangers.

And found that he'd set it down on top of a box.

Jonathan moved the basket again, on the off chance he'd placed it on something fragile—he wasn't sure why anyone would keep fragile items on the floor of a closet, but then, he wasn't a billionaire vigilante either—and was about to go back about his business when it occurred to him that this box looked familiar.

Like the kind he'd had in his apartment.

He expected Scarecrow to say something, but his other half was silent, leaving Jonathan to extend a shaking hand, opening the box. It was full of spiral-bound notebooks. He didn't need to open them to recognize them, and know that they were full of notes. His notes, for the toxin.


	91. Unresponsive

AN: So while reviewing the paperwork I have to sign for the wisdom teeth extraction, I came across a clause in the middle of the anesthesia agreement that basically amounted to "The patient is asleep and will not remember the procedure. They make appear to scream, yell, cry, or whimper, but they are asleep and will not remember the procedure." Now, I'm not worried about anesthetic awareness at all (two percent worried, at most) though redheads (me) are said to be more likely to experience it. I just find that a very strange way of wording the agreement. I'm not even sure what I'm meant to be agreeing to, there.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

For a moment, Jonathan had no emotional reaction. He didn't know _how _to react. The discovery was too sudden and strange for him to do anything but stare, mentally stating the obvious. _He kept my research._ And why would he keep it? Granted, Jonathan would much rather someone hold onto it—whether that meant shoving it in a disused filing cabinet or using it as a coaster—than throw it away. The idea of all the notes he'd been compiling since grad school—before he'd even imagined the compound, and was studying fear through conventional means—cast aside, gone to rot in a landfill until nothing was left, made him sick. This, this was much better.

For him. But Batman had always made clear that he thought the experiments were evil, and that Jonathan was mad for trying them. Considering that every chemical in this mansion—from the glass cleaner to the baking soda and vinegar—was under lock and key that would have given even Houdini pause, it was doubtful that he'd come around on the idea.

Whatever the reason behind Batman's decision to take the box back to the manor instead of leaving it to accumulate dust and moths in the apartment, Jonathan found himself grateful. Confused, but grateful. Even when he'd hated being inside Wayne Manor, it hadn't escaped his notice that the mansion was immaculate. There were no vermin here, nor was there water damage or mold. The notes were safer, huddled in the back of this closet, than they would ever be in that ragged apartment. He wasn't sure if that had been the Bat's intention, but regardless of intent, it was the outcome.

The corners of his mouth drew upward, though he was still too bewildered to truly smile. He opened the cover of the topmost notebook, scanning the formulas and observations without really reading them, allowing himself to be lost to the nostalgia of the moment. It was the same feeling he'd gotten when he opened the box containing his books; as if he'd been reunited with a close, inanimate friend that he hadn't seen for far too long.

_Why didn't he tell you?_

His fingers, which had been moving back and forth gently over the page opposite of the one Jonathan was glancing at, stilled. He could feel his writing beneath them, where he pushed hard enough with his pen to raise the lettering, like Braille. _What?_

_Why didn't he tell you? _Scarecrow repeated. He didn't sound accusatory, as he usually did when pointing out a flaw of the Bat's. Rather, he sounded like Jonathan imagined he would sound himself, had he puzzled out the box's location aloud a moment ago, or to Scarecrow, instead of keeping the thoughts to himself. Confused. As if he was listening to a favorite song, but with new lyrics. The rhythm stayed steady as always, and the melody familiar, but the words—and the intent—were different, and that changed everything. _That he brought these. He had to know that they're important to you._

Jonathan glanced at the box again—only half full of his research, after he took another glance, because he'd used relatively few notebooks due to his small handwriting, and the bottom half full of the psychiatric texts that hadn't fit with the other books. The sight of those old familiar things should have made the nostalgia greater. But with his other half's question, he found the box far less inviting. _He…we weren't exactly getting along when he brought my things back. He wouldn't have wanted me to have the chance to make any—_

_Make anything?_ Again, the scorn that should have been so present in Scarecrow's voice was absent. He sounded as though he was genuinely trying to work out the conundrum along with Jonathan, which made this all the worse. It was one thing when Scarecrow was angry and irrational. It was something else entirely when he was calm. _Jonathan, he hasn't trusted you with anything more than shampoo. You couldn't even put rubbing alcohol on your own wounds, remember?_

_Yes, but. _He hesitated, searching for an argument. _Maybe he thought actually having the notes would be too much of a temptation?_ The chemicals were under lock and key somewhere in the mansion, and given Batman's profession, they were more than just Windex and Scrubbing Bubbles. While Jonathan was no great shakes at lock picking, all of the repeat escapees from Arkham had some knowledge of how to do it, and he was no exception. He'd already shown Batman that he could pick the lock on the door of the guest bedroom, so it only made sense to keep him away from things that would possess him to search out potentially dangerous substances.

_You worked on that for _years_, and you're brilliant. He has to know you'd have at least a vague recipe in your head, notes or not._

Jonathan massaged his temples, feeling all the worry and distrust that he'd much rather do without flooding through him. _I don't know. He…he probably keeps things like this, from all the criminals with elaborate plans or weaponry. In case they do it again, or someone else copycats it._

_There aren't any other boxes in here._

Why did he have to have the rational argument? Scarecrow was never rational about anything, nine times out of ten. Fine time to stop screaming. _Maybe they're in the cave._

_So why isn't this one?_

_To protect it from water damage? _Even in his mind, the response sounded weak.

_He's rich. He must have…Bat Anti-Humidity…things. At the very least, an airtight container._

Jonathan was out of retorts, and they both knew it. The sense of gratitude had faded, replaced by his stomach tying itself into knots. _What's he doing with them, then?_

_I don't know, Jonathan. _Scarecrow's hands were on his shoulders, but it did little to quell his growing anxiety. _The fact that he has the box in the back of his closet would suggest that he doesn't want you to know about it._

Shit. He felt his chest tighten, unease making it hard to so much as breathe. It didn't seem like something Batman would do, not at all, but nice as the Bat was, he'd still locked Jonathan up. Put in surveillance cameras, and locked a GPS on him. They trusted each other now—at least, he assumed—but the Bat could have had anything in mind when he brought the notes up here. If the notebooks were here, he might be looking through them, surreptitiously. Jonathan had no idea what Batman hoped to find, if that was the case, but letting his work fall into the hands of the man who had turned it on him and stopped his experiments at every opportunity hardly seemed like a good idea, regardless of intent.

He heard a loud, choked sound and only realized after the fact that it had been him; his throat closing off as it did when he was especially panicked. Lack of oxygen only served to compound the problem, but he found it beyond difficult to focus on breathing deeply and steadily when he was starting to have a panic attack.

_Jonathan! _Scarecrow, unnerved as he was, but for different reasons. _Breathe. Listen, he probably has a perfectly good reason and we just haven't thought of it yet. Relax before you suffocate!_

_Not. Helping. _Relaxing was easier said than done, and when he was as worked up as this, it was just about impossible. He felt Scarecrow's hands on his shoulders again, this time pulling, and felt himself slipping deeper into his own mind, as he did on his own when the world became too much to handle. Go deeply enough, as he was now, and he ceased to register the outside world. Dangerous, perhaps, but the outside world was what had sent him into a panic attack in the first place, and anyway, as he noted while fading, retreating this way had made his breathing revert to normal.

* * *

"Jonathan?"

The closet door opening had woken Bruce up. Not that he'd known it was the closet at first; he hadn't opened his eyes until a few minutes later, trying to drift back to sleep. It didn't work, to his disappointment, though for once he wasn't exhausted upon awakening. Decent amounts of sleep and lack of strenuous activity did that for him, it would seem. Part of him thought he could get us to this. The other part was afraid of getting too comfortable with a sedentary life.

Upon opening his eyes, he'd found the bedroom door standing ajar, and for a moment had thought that was the source of the sound. He'd taken to closing his door when he and Jonathan were on unsteady terms, so it seemed reasonable, until he realized that Jonathan had been in his room all night, and he hadn't bothered shutting it. He moved his gaze to the closet, and found that door partially opened as well, light visible from underneath and to the side. Alfred, then, hanging up the laundry. Usually, the butler's presence was a welcome occurrence.

But after yesterday's argument, Bruce wasn't sure where they stood. And well-rested or not, he didn't want to get into it now, not before noon at least. He lay back down and closed his eyes, waiting to hear the man walk out of the bedroom before he did anything else. But there was no sound of footsteps, as he'd waited.

Instead, there was a loud cry.

Bruce had bolted out of the bed, tripped over the blankets he'd knocked off, and nearly ended up sprawled on the floor. "Alfred?!"

No reply.

He regained his balance, threw the door fully open. And found Jonathan sitting on the floor of the closet, motionless. Bruce flashed back to the Joker's dissociative state, blood running cold. _No. That can't be it. _"Jonathan?"

Jonathan didn't answer.

_Shit._ Bruce knelt down, keeping his distance for fear of making whatever this was worse. "Jonathan?" His expression wasn't as Scarecrow's had been with the plate incident yesterday. It was like the Joker's, when the Joker had broken. Empty. The only difference was his eyes. The Joker's had been completely blank, like his face. Jonathan's had a far off look. _Shit. Shit. Shit._ "Jonathan? Are you okay?"

Nothing. Bruce shook his head, struggling to control his racing pulse and thoughts, eyes falling to the box beside his catatonic companion. It took him a moment to remember what he was looking at. _Oh, fuck. _The research. He'd meant to leave in storage in the cave, as he did with his files on the high profile criminals, and other information about their activities and weaponry. He'd forgotten about it and carried it in with all the rest, shutting off the lights in the cave when he was through. It had seemed too much effort to go back down, given the late hour of the night, and giving it to Jonathan had been out of the question. So it had ended up in his own closet, forgotten. He'd meant to take it back down to the cave.

_Shit._ He didn't know what about the box had set Jonathan off—probably the fact that it was kept from him—but it had, and in the worst possible way. He'd stumbled upon the way to fix the Joker by pure chance, and he doubted putting on the Batsuit would have the same effect on Jonathan. "Jonathan? I'm sorry that I didn't tell you I had your notes. I wasn't going to do anything with them, I was keeping them around because I knew you didn't want anything bad to happen to them." A massive oversimplification, but he doubted getting into the details would help. He wasn't sure if Jonathan could hear him at all.

Music. That had brought Scarecrow around. It could work for Jonathan. Possibly. Hopefully. He didn't know what else to try. He wasn't the psychiatrist here. He'd "fixed" the Joker by sheer dumb luck. "Jonathan? Can you get up?"

If he could, he gave no indication.

"I'm going to take you to the other room, all right? I'm not going to try anything, I'm just going to carry you there? Okay?" Scarecrow had shivered when Bruce lifted him, drawn his legs closer to himself. Jonathan didn't move at all, as silent and motionless on the journey down the hall as he'd been sitting on the closet floor, and he was just as silent sitting on the couch in the living room.

"Für Elise" didn't rouse him, and neither did any of the songs on the Beethoven CD. Jonathan was equally unresponsive Mozart and Brahms. Chopin, Bach, and Haydn didn't stir him. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Marais. He'd run of soothing music, but continued, in the hopes that the familiarity alone would wake Jonathan up. It didn't, and they'd run out of classical music.

_The Nightmare Before Christmas _soundtrack. No. _Sweeney Todd. _Nothing. Emilie Autumn. Oren Lavie. Daft Punk. Jonathan barely blinked. That was when Alfred arrived, to ask if they wanted anything in particular for lunch, and immediately gathered that something was wrong.

"I—the research for his drug was in a box in my closet." Bruce didn't bother to explain how it had gotten there. "He found it and…" he trailed off, gesturing at the catatonic in front of him.

Alfred had an expression of subdued worry, which Bruce suspected was directed at him, not Jonathan. "I suppose I shouldn't ask him to put away laundry again."

"I don't know what to do, Alfred. I don't think he can hear me." It occurred to him, suddenly, that Jonathan couldn't take the antipsychotics in this state. As far as Bruce knew, he'd been taking them as prescribed, so missing one or two wouldn't make him sick, but if he didn't wake up…_Christ._

"I assume a bucket of water over the head would do more harm than good?"

"Yes." Bruce thought of the bath incident and shuddered.

"Sir," he paused. "If you can't bring him out of this, you may have no other choice but to take him back."

"I know." It was a last resort, but he was running out of alternatives.

He got Jonathan to eat, though it took about an hour and a half to get through the plate. Having exhausted the CDs, he tried the movies. Not the horror films. Even _My Fair Lady _didn't rouse him. Bruce retrieved one of his books—_The Sun Also Rises_—and read aloud, until he found himself too tired to make his eyes focus on the text.

There was no change the next morning.

Bruce relented to trying a modified version of Alfred's suggestion, after he'd gotten Jonathan to have breakfast, by washing his face off with a cool cloth. Jonathan didn't appear to feel it. Alfred mentioned that some schizophrenics had been brought out of catatonic states when their psychiatrists followed their odd breathing patterns with them and slowly brought the patterns back to normal, but as Jonathan was breathing normally, there was no way to try it. Completely out of other ideas, Bruce tried talking to him. Not about waking up, or anything in particular. Just talking. He kept the subject away from Batman, or Scarecrow, the Joker, things like that.

A few hours later, he had to stop for fear of losing his voice. _This is hopeless. _There was no way to get through to him. For all they'd been through, Bruce didn't know him well enough to draw him out. His things might be comforting on some level, but they were just things. He had nothing that could touch him on a deeply personal level, no access to Jonathan's friends outside of Arkham, if he even _had _friends outside of Arkham—

Struck by inspiration, Bruce reached down, pulled up Jonathan's pant leg. He punched in the combination on the anklet, and, with a faint beep, the GPS came loose. Jonathan didn't move as Bruce slid it off, still staring off into the distance, unresponsive. Just as always.

"Alfred?"

Alfred lifted his gaze from the paper he'd been reading. "Sir?"

"I—I know I said I wouldn't go out, but could you bring the car around? It's—"

He raised a hand to cut him off. "Which car, Master Wayne?"

"Whichever one you want." It wasn't as if it mattered what the car looked like, where they were headed.


	92. Flying

AN: It occurs to me that in the last chapter, I didn't do my usual "explain the musicians" business I usually do when I mention something pop culture-y. So, I'll take the time to do it here. Emilie Autumn is a self-described violinindustrial/victorianindustrial musician who often sings about madness and institutions. My favorite song of hers is "I Know Where You Sleep" (www. youtube. com/ watch?v=WUSESFK06O0) because I'm amazed by her lung capacity, though "Miss Lucy Had Some Leeches" and "Four O'Clock" better reflect the asylum theme.

Oren Lavie is the creator of what, in my opinion, is the greatest music video ever made, "Her Morning Elegance." www. youtube. com/ watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY

Daft Punk is the electronic band that wrote "One More Time," "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," and "Technologic," among others.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

There was Jonathan, and there was Scarecrow, and they were the only two people in the world.

The world consisted of the house and the fields. It was the house where he'd grown up, but different. It wasn't just that it was no longer falling apart—the warped and rotted boards repaired, the peeling, faded paint bright and fresh—it was the feel. The sense of foreboding was gone, the manor empty, both of people and bad memories. Likewise, the fields had stopped provoking a sense of anger or despair in him, perhaps because he knew there was no one here to force him through them, working past his stamina, past what any reasonable person could expect. Or it could be because they were already harvested. It was the way he'd imagined the world when he was too young to conceive of leaving Georgia, without anyone to hurt or ignore him. Perfect.

The only thing off was the fact that the scarecrow's pole in the field was empty, but that was because the scarecrow had long ago stepped down, and was seated beside him on the back porch, watching the sky. Jonathan was leaning against him, with one of Scarecrow's arms around his shoulder, and the other holding his hand. The straw that poked out of his wrists and lay about his person was softer than Jonathan remembered. He couldn't bring to mind the last time they'd sat like this.

That was all they'd done, really. Sit, with Scarecrow holding him until he relaxed. It seemed as though that had taken a long time. He had no sense of time, this deep within himself, but judging by all the flashes of different music he'd picked up on, from far, far off in the outside world, it had taken a while. He'd sat for so long in Scarecrow's embrace, panicked, mind racing with what Batman wasn't telling him and what he wanted and what the relationship really meant and why Batman had agreed to it and what else he was being kept from and everything else that popped into his head.

Funny, how little it bothered him now that he'd relaxed.

"Jonathan?"

A piece of straw fell on his shoulder; it must have come from Scarecrow's mouth as he spoke. He lifted his head, met Scarecrow's entirely blue eyes. "Yes?"

"I don't want this to happen again." Scarecrow slid his hand down Jonathan's back, rubbing. "The suffocating thing. I know you'd pass out and breathe again before it would kill you, but I don't like it. Seeing you suffer that way. I don't want it to happen anymore."

He almost smiled, in spite of himself. Scarecrow said it so cautiously, as if "panicking unto suffocation is bad" was a radical new idea no one else would ever agree to. "Neither do I."

"I…I'm sorry I kept pushing."

"It's not your fault." _Not entirely, at least. _He tightened his grip on Scarecrow's hand, serving as reminder that nothing would come between them. "I shouldn't have panicked like that." And there was no reason, once he looked at it logically. Bruce would have an explanation for this. He had to. And anyway, if he was so intent of keeping the notes secret, he'd have chosen a better spot than a closet.

All Jonathan had to do was ask. But for now, he was content to stay here, safe and comfortable. It couldn't have been that long, anyway.

"Jonathan?" Scarecrow was still hesitant. Jonathan wasn't sure if he found their role reversal intriguing or worrying.

"What is it?"

"I…I know you don't want to hear this, but I'm worried. I don't want anything to happen to you."

"Nothing will." He cupped his free hand against Scarecrow's cheek. It didn't seem to comfort him. "It was just a stupid misunderstanding. That's all."

"But they're _all _stupid misunderstandings." Scarecrow shook his head, glancing away. "And granted, some of them are my fault, but some of them aren't, and they keep happening. And ending with you hyperventilating or in tears. Jonathan…I just…I don't think this is going to work out."

His instinctive reaction was to ignore his other half, or tell him off for once again undermining what little happiness he'd gained since the Joker had forced him along for the ride. But…it hardly seemed worth the effort, and Jonathan wasn't sure if that was because they'd had this argument so many times, or because it might be right. He didn't _want _it to be right. This was the closest he'd been to happy since his romance with the Joker, and he didn't want things to end the way that relationship had. But here he was, hiding inside, unable and unwilling to confront his love. Maybe it wasn't meant to work out. But he couldn't bring himself to admit that. "I'm not going to assume the worst unless—"

Scarecrow stiffened, head perking to one side like a dog who'd just heard his master's call. "What is that?"

He opened his mouth to ask what his alter ego was talking about, stopping as the sound hit his own ears. A low and distant rumbling, almost too faint to hear, drifting in from the outside world. "Thunder?"

Scarecrow shrugged, then stiffened again as his face went white. "Or a car engine."

* * *

Jonathan blinked and found himself sitting in the passenger seat of one of Batman's cars. He didn't know which one; he couldn't identify it from the interior, beyond that it wasn't the Batmobile. There was a seatbelt fastened over his body that he hadn't put there, and Batman was in the driver's seat beside him, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand holding Jonathan's left, as Scarecrow had done inside. The sound had been an engine. They were driving.

Back to Arkham.

_Damn it._ He felt tears sting his eyes, such a common occurrence as of late. _He broke his promise._ _He lied. _And yet, as much as it hurt, and as shocking as it was, he couldn't so much as bring himself to shout over it, or even feel outraged. Scarecrow had been right, and Scarecrow was a part of him. The part that knew this relationship was an impossibility from the start. He blinked again, pushing the tears from his eyes. Foregone conclusion or not, he hadn't wanted it to happen. Not now, not ever.

He must have sighed, or made another sound to give himself away, because suddenly Batman's arms were around him, hugging too tightly for him to breathe, and the Bat's voice drowned out the sound of the engine-"Jonathan! Thank God you woke up!"—and he was torn between hugging back or crying louder, vaguely aware that the car was still moving without Batman steering. Jonathan couldn't bring himself to care if they crashed. _I don't want to go back._

Scarecrow's hand was on his shoulder, as reassuring as the Bat's hug, which was not at all. _It's all right. I'll be there for you._

Batman pulled away and grabbed the wheel before they could veer off the road, though his eyes stayed on his companion. His look was questioning and concerned, likely because of the silence. "Jonathan?"

He forced himself to talk. "How long have I been…out?" He didn't bother to ask if he could go home. Batman hadn't stopped the car, or moved to turn around, so that was a no. Wonderful.

"Almost a day and a half." One hand released the wheel and took his hand again, holding tight. "Jonathan, I'm sorry I didn't tell you I had your notes. I wasn't planning on doing anything with them, I p—"

"It's all right." Well, it wasn't, far from it, but not for that reason.

The nod Batman gave indicated that he also knew how not right things were. "Jonathan, we can't keep doing this."

_That's his justification for breaking his word to you? Disgusting._

"I—this isn't your fault, but we _have _to be able to talk to each other. I couldn't—you weren't lucid enough to take the pills, and that _can't _happen." His hand disappeared from Jonathan's briefly, to brush back his bangs before he replaced it. "I'll try to help you, anyway I can, if you're afraid, or upset, or whatever, but we have to _talk_."

_As if that'll matter when I'm in the madhouse. _He began to say so, eyes drifting away from Batman to the highway before them, as the car switched lanes, taking the exit that would lead them to the main land. "I—this isn't the way to Arkham." There was a flicker of hope combating the butterflies in his stomach, and naïve as Scarecrow warned him it was, he couldn't bring himself to snuff it out.

Batman gave him a blank stare, and the flicker grew. "I'm not taking you to Arkham, Jonathan."

"Where are we going?"

* * *

The Gotham City Stables lay right on the edge of the city limits, not far from the house where Jonathan had lived when he had the horse. They'd come within a hair's breadth of crashing the car again, when Bruce told Jonathan the destination and found the man nearly sitting on top of him immediately afterward, having undone the seatbelt and half-climbed into Bruce's lap, to better hug him. The constant shouts of "I love you!" broken only by kisses didn't help. He still wasn't sure how he'd pried Jonathan off without getting them killed.

Even so, Bruce couldn't bring himself to be irritated by the recklessness. Had he not been behind the wheel of the car, he'd have done the same when Jonathan woke up. Hell, he almost had anyway. There was so much to be addressed between them, so many doubts still racing in the back of his mind as to how this relationship was ever going to work in the long term, but that's where they were going to remain for now. At the back of his mind. Because Jonathan was conscious, and happy, and he didn't plan to address anything beyond the bare minimum of the issues unless he absolutely had to.

"Bruce?"

He shifted the car into park, unfastened his belt. "Yes?"

"I—" His eyes shifted to the side, but his expression didn't suggest that he was talking to Scarecrow. Just nervous. "Were you planning on taking me here before I woke up?"

"Yes, I was." Not the wisest plan in retrospect—dragging a catatonic man to a horse was sure to raise questions, and even if he paid the employees off, there would be suspicions. But he wanted to help Jonathan, in any way he could, and he wanted to do that without breaking the promise, if it could at all be avoided. The horse had seemed important enough to have a chance at reviving him, and given his reaction after being told where they were going, Bruce had guessed correctly.

His voice was small. "What if it hadn't worked?"

"I'd have taken you back." Lying was out of the question, after seeing what even hiding things from him had done. "I know I promised—I wouldn't want to, but the psych wards in the hospitals don't know your history, and I thought that Arkham, even if you hate them, would be better equipped to—"

"Bruce?"

"Yes?"

Jonathan unfastened his seatbelt, slipping on the sunglasses and hat Bruce had brought along with them. "Do you think they have a restroom?"

"I'm sure they do."

Jonathan slipped into it while Bruce waited outside the door, alerting a stable hand to their presence so the horse could be prepared. He emerged from the restroom, hair and face still concealed, and grabbed Bruce's hand in his own. "Bruce? Thank you."

Bruce responded with a hug, without caring as to what anyone else saw or thought. "We can come back here as often as you want, all right? I'm sorry it took me so long to think of it."

"Don't be. I never asked."

He took Jonathan's hand again, started the walk toward the stalls. He was surprised to find himself hopeful, for the first time in what seemed like years. Funny, how long a day and a half lasted when it was spent with a catatonic loved one. The stable hand reappeared, leading the horse by the reins. Bruce had little interest in horses himself, but even he had to admit that this one was beautiful; sleek, tall, and dark. He'd gone for hundreds of thousands when Bruce had bought him, and from what the auctioneers had mentioned of his racing history, he was worth every cent.

Jonathan made a choked, happy sound, and asked for the reins by way of stepping toward the stable hand, his hand out stretched. After a glance at Bruce and his nod, she handed them over, leaving the two of them with the horse. It occurred to Bruce that he'd never seen Jonathan this elated before, even when they'd begun their relationship, or he'd gone outside.

"Nightmare." He stroked the horse's mane, almost glowing with joy. "I missed you, boy. I'm sorry I haven't seen you in so long."

The horse nuzzled against Jonathan's shoulder in response. Bruce wasn't sure if Nightmare remembered him—Jonathan had only had him for a month or so, and he had no idea how long a horse's memory lasted—or if he was simply happy for the attention, but either way, Jonathan was elated.

He stood there for some time, stroking and speaking to the horse, before he moved to the side and, to Bruce's surprise, got onto the saddle unassisted. Considering the horse's height and Jonathan's small stature, he'd have expected the mount to go less smoothly, but then, he must have had practice when he learned to ride.

"Come with me." Jonathan wrapped the reins around his hands, motioning with his head for Bruce to sit behind him.

"I don't think—"

"Nightmare won't mind, will you?" He ran his fingers over the mane again. "And it'll make me happy. See, they put a two-person saddle on. They must have seen me come in with you."

Bruce considered it. He knew how to ride horses, though it wasn't anything he'd made a habit of.

"You'll like it," Jonathan pleaded, with widened and adorable eyes. "It's like flying over the ground."

He conceded with a nod, mounting with considerably more difficulty than Jonathan had. He wrapped his arms tightly around Jonathan's waist, leaning forward against his partner's back as Nightmare started to move. It felt nothing like flying, but it was pleasant nonetheless.


	93. Nightmare

AN: Sorry for wait on this one. Finals aren't for another week, but I've been swamped with schoolwork over the past few days, and when I wasn't working, my creativity was absolutely zapped from the effort. Also, I was drawn into some sort of odd romance party earlier today in which I learned that my body's pheromones apparently smell like Fruit Stripes gum. Anyway, due to the way my finals are spaced, I should have time to study for them during the actual finals week, which should leave this coming week relatively free. Hopefully. I'm hoping to have this story finished by the time I head home for Christmas break.

And on a random note, my roommate woke up this morning to inform me that she'd had a dream in which the Joker cut the brake lines in her car, trying to kill her so I could have the dorm room to myself. She went on to say that, in the dream, she knew he'd done it because she discovered a note explaining the plan in one of her books, written by me, because I was possessed/influenced somehow by my Joker doll. I am not making this up. The odd thing is that her dream involved being in the car while her parents argued, and my Joker dream that I recall almost none of also involved being in a car while my parents argued. As such, I have decided that my Joker poster comes to life in the night and whispers random things in our ears to give us strange dreams.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Scarecrow was silent.

Jonathan, preoccupied with having the time of his life, atop the horse with Bruce's arms wrapped around him, didn't notice. This was quite possibly the happiest moment he'd had in years, and the only way it could get any better would be if there was a way to make out on horseback without getting them thrown off or killed. There wasn't—at least, not as far as Jonathan could ascertain—but it didn't matter on anything beyond a superficial level that was quickly sated as soon as Bruce tightened his arms around Jonathan's torso.

For him, it couldn't get any better than this.

For Scarecrow, it couldn't get any worse.

He stayed at the back of their mind watching—fuming—with the mental and emotional connections closed. He found himself fighting back tears. Tears. There had been a time when he never cried. He wasn't _supposed _to cry. And now he'd been reduced to this.

Scarecrow couldn't tell if that was a sign of an emotional breakdown, or if he was picking up Jonathan's traits because his consciousness was deteriorating. Either prospect was horrifying—though the latter more so than the former—because neither should be happening. He was meant to be the foundation, steady and unchanging. Not weeping. And as for the idea of losing the separation he'd spent his life trying to gain…_There aren't words for that kind of horror._

The thought of going back to the way things were before, when he was a nothing more than a long-lasting imaginary friend, did more than turn his stomach. It made his blood—Jonathan's blood—run ice-cold, though his other half ignored it as he did with all of Scarecrow's suffering. Maybe he honestly _couldn't _sense it. Scarecrow was the protector, in theory. There was no reason for their body to make Jonathan experience his alter ego's physical manifestations of fear or stress.

It struck him as a sensible idea for a minute—comfortable, even, much better than the idea that Jonathan would purposefully overlook his anxieties—before the full meaning of such a thought sank in. That would mean that their body, by its very design, excluded his sensations from the waking half. Like a tapeworm, that bit into the intestines and starved the host, without ever being felt.

The thought that their relationship could be parasitic and not symbiotic nearly made him scream.

He couldn't return to the outside world. Could not. Not because he'd lost the ability to take control—he _would _have screamed if that had happened, let down the barriers and screamed as loud as he possibly could—but because he couldn't bear the thought of sitting there with the Batman's arms around him, trying to act as if nothing was wrong so he wouldn't alienate Jonathan. It wasn't possible, and the mere thought of attempting it made his stomach churn. He'd been happy when Jonathan had vomited on the Bat, after the water. But he doubted being sick over Nightmare would be at all cathartic.

And there was the part of him that he wanted to strangle, rip out and shred to pieces, that wondered if he might not enjoy being held, should he take control.

So he stayed hidden, waiting Jonathan to notice his silence and feel concerned. Call out to him from inside, maybe miss a bit of the Batman's words from the worry. He didn't, not in the entire time they were at the stables.

He did notice on the ride home, and Scarecrow risked surfacing for a moment to say a few words, assure him that he'd been happy to be reunited with Nightmare too, retreating again before Jonathan could notice the shake in his voice. Jonathan didn't notice his silence again, not for the rest of the ride, or the hours afterward in the mansion, and was still oblivious that night as Scarecrow forced himself to sleep, hoping that the restful, dreamless darkness would give him some clue as to how to restore the relationship.

* * *

There was no restful, dreamless darkness. There was no bed beneath him, no silken sheets over his body when his eyes opened. Nor was there the ceiling of the guest bedroom, or any ceiling. There was a wall, warped, decaying and he was standing, staring at it. The boards were so thoroughly rotted and derelict that he couldn't see how they held together, and were spotted with something that was either the few remaining flakes of paint or wallpaper long gone, or mold. The lighting was too dim for him to be certain, either way, and Scarecrow felt no inclination to move closer.

He was standing in the manor where Jonathan grew up, but it had never been this bad, never when he had lived there. If the house still stood today, it might be in such a state of disrepair, but he doubted it.

Scarecrow closed his eyes, tried to ignore the sounds of the house around him, creaking and dripping, with water or rot or God knew what else. He tried to tell himself that he did not feel the floorboards groaning beneath his weight, did not feel the stitching running through his mouths or the straw about his body. "Wake up," he whispered, trying to ignore the tug on his lips as he spoke, the sensation of hay pushing out between the stitches. It tasted rotted.

_Wake up. _He imagined the feel of the guest bed's sheets, so soft and comfortable. He hated them, in the waking world, as he hated all of the Batman's trappings of wealth, hated everything that made Jonathan feel at home with the monster who had ruined their life. He might have found pining for them now ironic, if he had a sense of humor about the situation, which he decidedly did not. _Wake up. You don't want to be here. It is not safe here. Wake up._

He kept his eyes shut so tightly they ached. He was not awake and he knew it without looking around. He was not a lucid dreamer, despite his efforts otherwise. _Wake up wake up wake up. WAKE. UP._

Somewhere down the hall there was a noise, inhuman in origin. It was deep, animalistic, and Scarecrow's eyes flew open with fear upon hearing it. He spun away from the hall to face the door, hands raised to defend himself. But the hall was empty, aside from the shadows. The shadows covered all of it but the first foot or so, where the weak light from the filthy parlor room window managed to illuminate it. The rest was black as pitch, not without the light so much as seeming to suppress it. Scarecrow strained his eyes staring into the dark, searching for the source of the sound to no avail.

Whatever it was, he did not look forward to seeing it.

He looked away from the hallway, wondering as he did if that was not unsafe, glancing over the filthy floor as he turned back to face the wall. His progress was halted when he caught sight of the yarn. It was red in color, as always, and disappeared into his chest, as always, but there were several distinct differences from its appearance now and its pervious manifestations in his other dreams. _Nightmares._

The first was the slack. It had been tight as a violin's string in the first dream. Looser in the second, but still suspended before him, though at a lower level. Now, it lay on the ground before him, its descent to the floor beginning almost as soon as it left his chest. He took a step forward, experimentally. For a moment, it just lay there, before sliding slowly upwards. As if it was a fishing line being rolled in inch by inch, by someone with an attention span of two seconds.

The second was the color. It had been bright red in the first nightmare, a darker shade in the second. Here it was a deep maroon, purple enough that it leaned toward blue. Likewise, the texture had changed with it, going from that of actual yarn to softer, like cord, and moist, to perfectly smooth and wet enough for the grime on the floor to stick.

He touched it, gently. The tips of his fingers were coated, faintly, with red when he pulled away. Blood. It had to be blood, because the last and most fundamental difference, the first he'd noted, was that he was no longer looking at a strand of yarn. It was vein, or artery, he wasn't sure which, but something important, something essential, something needed to live.

Scarecrow could imagine who he would find at the other end.

There was a rustle, like the wings of a bird, that seemed to come from every corner of the room at once. Startled, he turned again to face in the direction that the yarn—it was somewhat less horrific, if he still thought of it with that term—trailed. Up the stairs.

He began up them, lifting the bloody, disgusting strand in his hands when it didn't wind fast enough. Holding in, trying to gently force it into his body without injuring himself, he got a good look at his hands, and realized they were rotting.

Not rotting in the manner that the Joker had been, the way a human body would. Because he was not a human, Jonathan was. His skin was split, in places, particularly around the joints, the way a shirt tore around the sleeves. And like a fabric, the tears were not clean, but ragged, bits of skin unraveled like loose threads. The straw beneath was blackened, slimy. He thought he glimpse an insect of some kind crawling through it, fought back the urge to gag.

_He does not want me anymore._

No. No. He could not think that way. He refused to think that way. Jonathan needed him. Jonathan loved him. Jonathan had created him to be with him always, make sure that he was never alone. They shared a bond that was beyond an outsider's understanding, beyond anything that two separate people, no matter how close, could ever hope to attain.

And yet he was rotting.

_He loves me. _The stairs groaned beneath his feet, but held. They should not have supported him; they looked as if a strong wind would collapse them. But they held him. Because unlike a human being, a scarecrow did not have much weight. _Jonathan loves me. I will find him, and he will fix this. He loves me._

That sound again. Like a growl, but that didn't cover it. He felt like Theseus, trapped in the minotaur's lair, but without a weapon, or the skill to fight. There was a shadow, out of the corner of his eye, black as the ones in the hall had been, and from what he could see in his peripheral vision, it had the shape of a bat. And a man. The Batman, but not the one that existed in the real world. The monster from the toxin hallucinations, coming after him.

Presumably to kill him.

Scarecrow ran. He no longer noticed or cared if the vein spooled in at his speed, only glancing down to ensure that he did not step on it, and pulling it with him as he turned the corner at the top of the stairs to keep it from catching on the rail, tearing, killing him before the Batman could. It led him down the old familiar hall, though it was longer now than he remembered, and distorted, changing size as he ran through it, like a funhouse.

The growling behind him grew louder.

The vein lead to the door of the bedroom, his bedroom, and he ran inside, pulling it in with him with bloodied, decaying hands, so he could slam the door behind him, offer some measure of protection. The frame was distorted, and the door as well, not wanting to shut. He slammed it closed with his shoulder—felt the skin tear as he did—and collapsed on the floor, panting. Bits of straw and earwigs fell between his legs. Something caught in the mouth stitching, twitching, and he wiped the hand with the back of his mouth to push it away. His skin pulled as he did. It might have torn. He couldn't tell.

There was a pounding from outside, a dark shadow falling over the crack between the floor and the door. He whimpered, pulled himself toward the center of the room, as coated in the floor's grime as the vein was. Scarecrow glanced forward to see where it led from here—

—And saw where it ended.

The room was unlike it had been growing up, devoid of the bed and chest of drawers. There was a mirror, in the bed's place, directly before him, that had never been there in his childhood. It was the only thing in the room that was not covered in dust.

The pounding grew louder, rattling the hinges.

The vein, taut again, ran into the mirror, sloping upwards on the other side. It did not show his reflection, or the reflection of the bedroom around him. Rather, it showed the guest bedroom of Wayne Manor, and Jonathan inside, lying on the bed.

"Jonathan!"

Jonathan did not look up. He did not appear to hear.

"Jonathan!" Scarecrow felt tears on his face, shuffled toward the mirror, slamming his hand against it, trying to reach through. He could not, whether he tried near the vein or away from it. And Jonathan still did not hear. "Jonathan!"

He heard something wooden cracking behind him. Scarecrow slammed his hand against the mirror, smearing rot and straw over the glass and doing fuck all to push himself through. "Jonathan! Jonathan, God, help me! Help me! Pull me through! It's Scarecrow, it's Scarecrow, God, Jonathan, _help _me!"

And the door opened. There were footsteps, not loud and pounding as he expected, and the footsteps moved closer to him, stopping at his side. Unable to help himself, Scarecrow looked up, dreading the sight that would meet him. He did not see the Batman.

He saw Bruce Wayne.

A man. A mortal human man. Rich, yes, a magnificent fighter, but a man nonetheless. A human being.

"Jonathan." It was the man who spoke, this time.

One the bed, Jonathan shifted, as if rousing from sleep. Scarecrow tried to call out, his own voice strangled by shock.

"Jonathan."

Jonathan sat up, the vein going slack again as he did. He looked to the mirror, eyes meeting the man's. Smiled.

Scarecrow felt himself sob.

And Jonathan stepped forward, without a glance to the ground, stepping on the blood vessel conjoining them. It tore. Jonathan didn't feel it. Scarecrow did, and he screamed as it slid back into him, leaving the hole in his chest open and bleeding, gushing over the floor, thick and fast and over the pain he could see the man approach the mirror, extend his hand, and Jonathan did the same on the other side, moving until their hands met and Jonathan pulled the man through, uncaring or oblivious that Scarecrow lay dying on the floor, and he screamed and screamed and

bolted up in the guest bed, unable to cry out, or even breathe, throat constricted with panic. The sheets were soaked with sweat, and his heart was hammering at a hundred miles an hour as he forced himself out of the bed, trying to control his breathing as he collapsed to the floor, feeling for the shoes that he was unable to make out without his glasses.

_Scarecrow?_ Jonathan sounded terrified, shaking as he embraced his other half. _Scarecrow, what happened? What's wrong?_

He reached his hand up to the nightstand table, feeling around until he touched the familiar glass and wire. He slid the glasses on, panted.

_Scarecrow?_

_We're leaving. Now._


	94. Confrontation

AN: All right, then, I've vowed to stop saying that I won't be busy anymore and I'll have all sorts of writing time because, as life as proved over the past few days, that's obviously not true. Sunday I had a group project filming thing that took far longer than it should have, Monday night I had a long speech class (in which I gave a speech persuading people to play Humans vs. Zombies, realizing about a minute into said speech that I'd somehow memorized all seven minutes though I'd only written it the day before), and Tuesday I came down with a cold/got drawn into my dorm's painfully empty board game night. So the point is, obviously the week before finals has got me busier than I'd anticipated, so expect sporadic updates, at least until I'm home for Christmas break. At which point my wisdom teeth are coming out, so the updates will probably be sporadic again. Gah.

Thanks for the reviews!

_

* * *

_

What?

Scarecrow, having located the shoes, didn't answer. He shoved them onto his feet, mind racing, debating what they did and didn't need to take with them. The pills. Where were the pills? Nightstand. He stopped tying mid-lace, grabbed the prescription bottle, shoved it in his pocket. Essentials. They only needed the essentials. Even Jonathan's notes—still, as far as he knew, upstairs in that closet—were unnecessary in the task of getting the hell out of here.

A coat, maybe. Was it cold outside? Faster just to forgo it, but he didn't want to escape certain death here only to succumb to pneumonia outside. He rifled through the box, grabbed the first jacket he laid eyes on, and stood, throwing open the door. It slammed against the wall. He couldn't be bothered to care if he'd woken anyone.

_Scarecrow! _He could feel Jonathan struggling to take control, pushed him back. There was a wave of panic in response. Good. It wasn't even a fraction of what he'd felt when Jonathan had ignored him for Batman. _What's wrong? Where are you going?_

_Away from here. _He began down the hall, setting his mind to work out the problem of just how they were going to get out, given the locked door and security system, but Jonathan dug his heels in, hindering his movement. _Stop it._

_Talk to me_, Jonathan pleaded. How ironic. _Tell me what's going on. Things are going well for once, why do you want to lea—_

_Like hell they are._ He wondered if shouting would shock Jonathan enough to make him let go. They _had _to get out of here, before it was too late, especially now that he'd thrown the door open. He didn't know what the odds were that the sound may have woken someone up, given that the Bat slept upstairs—he had no idea where the butler slept, or if he did at all—but it wasn't a risk he wanted to take. _Nothing is going well Jonathan. _Nothing._ You might be able to blind yourself to that fact, but I won't, and I'm not going to let the Batman tear our lives apart because—_

_That's what this is about?_ Jonathan was incredulous, but beyond that, he was cold. Dismissive. As if it wasn't a legitimate threat. As if Scarecrow's concerns weren't important to him. _You want me to abandon the only person in my life who loves me because you can't bring yourself to give him a second chance?_

The only person in my life who loves me. The _only _person. Scarecrow felt tears start in his eyes, and Jonathan was either oblivious or uncaring. _He doesn't love you! You only want to believe that he loves you because you're desperate for affection! It's what you did with Harley, it's what you did with the Joker, and now you're doing it with the Ba—_

_This time it's different._

_No. No, it isn't. _He kept walking despite Jonathan's protests, without a specified location. Just…away from here. Both from the room the Bat would head if he'd heard the noise, and one of the places where Jonathan had become comfortable. Domestic. And Scarecrow hadn't thought to stop him. _You just want to believe it's different. Open your eyes, Jonathan! Hasn't experience taught you that this is never going to work?_

_You don't know that—_

_I know a hell of a lot better than you. _He couldn't stop the tears, and it was hardly worth concern anymore, despite all that it signified. _Who's the one there to pick up the pieces? Me. Who's the one to warn you about this things? Me. Who's the one you ignore every time and replace with your crushes and can't even bring yourself to care about or even notice because if it's not the goddamn Batman it isn't important? ME._

Jonathan recoiled as if slapped. Scarecrow shouldn't have enjoyed it. He did. _I—that's not true. I'm not replacing you. Just because I—_

_Really? _He laughed without meaning to, and there wasn't any humor to it. _When was the last time you spoke to me, before I woke you up, then?_

Silence. He felt the rush of guilt he'd been longing for, sensed the racing thoughts as Jonathan scrambled for something to say. _I'm sorry._

_You should be._

_I _am. _And it won't happen aga—_

_That's what you said when you ignored me for the Joker._

The tears forming in their eyes were Jonathan's, now. It took the edge of his anger, but only just. _I'm sorry._

_Sorry doesn't keep it from happening again. We're leaving._

_Wait! _Jonathan grabbed his hand again, and Scarecrow could feel his fingers shake. _We don't have to leave. I—we can work through this, it doesn't mean leaving Bruce—_

He was overcome with the urge to shove Jonathan back, though he resisted. God, what was this place doing to them? _You don't get it. It's not going to work. It never does._

_But Bruce is—_

_Just like everyone else. How many times does history have to repeat itself for you to get it, Jonathan? _The Batman didn't love him. He _couldn't _love him. _Your mother didn't love you, your great-grandmother didn't love you, Harley didn't love you, the Joker didn't love you, and the Batman doesn't either. I am the only one who has ever loved you, and I'm _sick_ of being cast aside._

_But…he's not like that._

_WHY NOT? _He couldn't keep from shouting; not that he tried to restrain himself. _Just WHAT is it about the Bat that makes him SO different from everyone else in your entire fucking life? What, he gave you things? So did the Joker. He took you to your horse? The Joker gave you the damn thing! He gives you affection? What? He doesn't do a damn thing that anyone else hasn't done and he'll keep you locked up to rot for the rest of your goddamn life, because you'll sit there and let him. How the hell is that any different?_

Jonathan was crying in earnest now. He was going too far, too fast, but the point _had _to be driven in. If they stayed, Scarecrow would die and Jonathan would be trapped with that monster forever. He would do anything in his power to stop that. Anything. _He's a good person. He is. I know you don't believe it, but he loves me. He won't keep me here forever. Scarecrow, I know he's worth the risk. He's a good person._

Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. If Jonathan was convinced his beloved Bat wasn't the devil incarnate, Scarecrow had nothing to argue with. Except for a point he _really _didn't want to make.

But he didn't have any other options. _Fine. He's a good person. You're not._

Silence followed. It wasn't a shocked silence, not exactly; Jonathan was too taken aback to truly be offended. _What?_

_You're not a good person. Not by his standards. _His stomach turned as he spoke. _He's fine with you _now_, but what happens when the elation is over and he realizes what you are?_

_He…_Jonathan's resolve weakened. Not by much, but the smallest of cracks could be forced wide open with enough perseverance. _I'm not doing that anymore._

_Only because you don't have the access. You'd love it if you still could. I know because I want it too. You know it, I know it, and soon enough, he's going to work it out._

_But he knows about the experiments. He knew before we got close. He knew, and it didn't bother him._

_I know. But he doesn't—_God, he didn't want to say this, didn't want to be so heartless—_he doesn't know everything, does he?_

_What? _It sounded as if Jonathan knew perfectly well what he was talking about.

_He doesn't know about the other things you've done. He might know that you fired a gun at your students—_Jonathan twitched—_but do you think he knows about prom night? About what happened to Sherry?_

_Stop it._

_Dead, because she rejected you._

_That was an _accident. _You know that._

_Would he see it that way? Would he call it an accident, with your great-grandmother?_

_Stop it._

_You watched her di—_

_STOP IT!_ Sobbing silently, Jonathan sank to the floor, arms wrapped around him in a futile attempt to protect from his own memories. _You were there! If it was so wrong, why didn't you—_

_It's all right. _Scarecrow knelt beside him, hugging him despite Jonathan's attempts to push him back. _It's all right. I know why you did that. I understand. He won't. That's why we need to get out of here. That's why we have to leave._

* * *

The thing about being suspended from all Batman activities until further notice, as Bruce had discovered, was that his body didn't realize the change. Thus, the body told the mind that sleeping in the dead of night would get him shot, so the mind kept him awake. So much for resting to recover. He'd heard, once upon a time, that after half an hour or so lying in bed without sleep, it was better to get up and be active than keep lying in wait, so he found himself in the kitchen, figuring that if he couldn't give himself sleep, he could at least provide nourishment.

The problem being that his body wasn't accustomed to food in the middle of the night, either.

He closed the refrigerator door, sighed, switched off the lights. Time to go lie in bed again, waiting for sleep that wouldn't come. He was going to go insane before Alfred would allow him to go out again. Maybe that had been the butler's plan all along, though Bruce couldn't figure how driving him mad would benefit anyone.

He was almost to the stairs when he heard Jonathan.

It wasn't the footsteps. The man had stepped lightly enough for those to be undetectable. It was his breathing, labored and uneven, as if he'd been running. Or crying. Bruce turned around, watched as Jonathan stepped into the entry way, fully dressed and clutching a jacket. He didn't notice that he wasn't alone, and from his slow, faltering steps, Bruce wondered for a moment if he wasn't sleepwalking. He moved to the window, lifted the shade, examining it.

"Jonathan?"

There was no answer. He didn't seem to have heard.

"Jonathan?" he repeated, louder.

The smaller man stiffened, spun around. There was a shine to his face and while Bruce couldn't be sure, in the dark of the room, he looked as if he'd been crying. Hard. "What's wrong?"

Jonathan flinched backwards, leaning against the wall by the window. "Bruce."

"What happened?"

"I—I need to leave."

* * *

"What?"

_Oh God oh God oh God I can't do this._

_You can. _Scarecrow's hands were on his shoulders, straightening back up. It was the only thing keeping him from cowering on the floor a second time. Break the window, Scarecrow had said. Break the window, and run. The alarm will go off, but you'll get out in time. You'll be gone before they get down the stairs. Only then Bruce had been here—and Christ, when had he become "Bruce?" Batman had disappeared after the horse and Jonathan wished he hadn't; it might be easier—and he'd tried for straightforward, but he could _not _do it. _I'm right here. You can._

"I…I n-need to leave. I j-just—" Fuck, the tears had started again and he couldn't stop them. "Take me b-b-back to Arkham, or something. I can't be here."

"What's wrong?" Damn it, why did have to be so _concerned_? So…perfectly loving, and he crossed the room, worry etched across his face, as Jonathan tried to step around him, but Bruce put his hands on his shoulders, holding him there, and Jonathan didn't know if he wanted to scream or sob. "Jonathan, talk to me. What are you worried about?"

"This—" his voice cracked. "This isn't going to w-work."

And then Bruce was hugging him, and he _did _sob, despite both Bruce and Scarecrow's attempts to soothe him. "It _will _work. I'll find a way to take you out, in public, without hiding. I promise that I will, I just need the time—"

"That's n-not it."

"What is it?" Bruce's hand was running up and down his back and it felt so _good _and that only made it all worse. "Did I do something?"

As if _he _could do anything. "No! I don't deserve you."

"Jonathan." He said it as if he understood, hugged tighter. "You are _not _a bad person."

"I am!"

"No, you're not. The experiments were—"

"It's not the experiments!" He ripped himself free, retreating to the opposite of the room. He expected Scarecrow to tell him to shut up, but his alter ego was silent, and he couldn't keep himself from blurting it, much as he wanted to keep the secret. "I _killed_ my great-grandmother."

Bruce could only stare.

* * *

The sun was sweltering, but Jonathan was used to it. He'd had all fifteen years of his life to adjust to Georgia, after all, and the walk home couldn't hold a candle to the hours he'd spent toiling in the fields, from the moment he was tall enough to use a hoe. Still, it wasn't pleasant, especially when his knees were bloody from being shoved into the gravel on the walk home. He hadn't been shoved hard, not by the idiots' usual standards, but it had been hard enough to draw blood. And to tear through the denim of his jeans, already patched and faded.

He didn't want to picture what it would be like when he got home, all _Do you think I'm made of money, boy? _and _Have you no sense of responsibility, Jonathan, do you want to turn out like your worthless whore of a mother? _and probably her cane across his legs if he couldn't run fast enough, all over a new pair of jeans. He had no problem with the ripped ones. He knew that she would. Never mind that everybody else wore them, and on purpose. Everybody else was a godless heathen off to burn in the lake of fire.

Jonathan stepped onto the porch, paused at the door. It was, by his standards, a good day so far. The shoving was really the only thing that had happened, and for him, that was record-worthy. He didn't want to go inside and ruin all of that. Though the waiting only made it worse.

There was a slamming sound, from the kitchen inside, as if his great-grandmother had knocked over a chair. Wonderful. So she was already furious about something. Which meant that he'd be beaten all the worse if he was found lingering outside, probably with some Biblical quote about eavesdropping shouted at him again and again. He'd used the Bible against her once—and only once—"it is better to live in a corner of the roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman," and he still shuddered to think of the aftermath. He'd gotten the birds for that one. Bracing himself, Jonathan opened the door and stepped into the equally stifling house.

To see his great-grandmother sprawled across the tile, clutching her chest.

"Gramma?" He hadn't called her that since he was a little boy, since he'd learned proper enunciation. Strange, that his mind focused on his phrasing, rather than the situation at hand. Jonathan had never seen a heart attack before, lacking a television as well as a real life experience, but he could tell what the problem was from the way his grandmother was clutching her chest with clawed, arthritic fingers, gasping for breath. She looked very pale. He wondered how long it had been going on, before she fell.

"Boy," she gasped. "Phone…call…"

Jonathan's eyes moved to the old rotary phone by the doorway, and he took a step toward it, stopped. He glanced back toward the door. His shoes hadn't left any marks to indicate his recent presence. His eyes next fell to the cane, on the floor beside her, and then her hands, the hands that had grabbed him, slapped him, held him under the water.

"Jonathan!" There was terror on her face now, something he had never seen before. It felt _wonderful. _"Jonathan…please…"

He shook his head, picked up the phone. _I can't. I can't. She's my grandmother._

Flashes of the birds filled his vision, of the water. The beatings, the stories of demons that would carry him to hell unless he did exactly as she said. He replaced the phone, pulled a chair from the table, and sat. To watch. When she crawled toward him—wincing horribly, maybe she'd broken something when she fell—begging as best she could and weakly trying to grab his ankles, he pulled his feet up, continued to watch.

And then she was gone.

He stepped outside before his mother got back, walked away from the house, far out of sight. Somewhere along the walk he started laughing, and found that he couldn't stop. _She's gone. She's really gone…she can't ever hurt me again. She's dead. _He laughed until he cried, and then he couldn't stop crying. When he did return, long after, his mother was white as a sheet and held him, for the first time he could remember in his life. For a few weeks, it was wonderful, but then they moved from the house and she was distant as always, and he found himself _missing _his great-grandmother. Negative attention was better than neglect, it seemed, and he'd killed the only person who would give him so much as that.

* * *

Bruce stared. He didn't move to hold him.

Jonathan sobbed, covering his eyes. "I killed her. And it made me h-happy. I l-let her die, I'm e-evil, and it's my fault that—"

Then Bruce _was _holding him, so tightly that he could scarcely breathe. Maybe that was the point. Maybe he was so repulsive that Bruce wanted to shatter his ribs, make him suffer as his victims had. As his great-grandmother had. "My parents were murdered."

He didn't answer, bracing himself for a hit. Bruce relaxed his grip a bit, tilted Jonathan's head back to meet his eyes. "The man who killed them was released from jail when I was in college." He looked pained, though Jonathan couldn't think of why, unless it was still disgust.

"I brought a gun to his trial. I was going to shoot him."

The air was knocked out of him so quickly that for a moment Jonathan thought he _had _been punched. "What?"

"I was going to shoot him. The only reason I didn't is because someone else got him first. And it made me happy. Remember Rachel Dawes?"

Jonathan nodded as best he could with Bruce's hand gently entwined in his hair.

"She was furious when she found out. She was my wakeup call." He went back to hugging, even tighter this time. "You didn't get one in time. Jonathan…what you did wasn't right. I won't deny that. But you're not evil. Look at you." His hand was on Jonathan's face now, wiping at the tears. "You're not happy. You know it was wrong. Evil would be if you knew and you didn't care."

Gratitude and relief was coursing through him with all the magnitude of the Great Flood, tears of relief replacing tears of disgust and fear. He stammered to thank him, but he didn't get the chance before Scarecrow took control and punched Bruce, with everything he had, right in the stitches.

* * *

Bruce staggered backwards, gasping. His vision reeled from the pain, and he couldn't tell if the stitches had torn or not. He didn't get the chance to check, either, or even sit up, before Scarecrow was on him again, punching and slapping at clawing at any skin within reach. "Is that all you do?!"

"Stop!" He tried not to shout, to sound commanding without growling, and failed on both counts. He grabbed Scarecrow's wrists, and the man struggled like a wounded animal, kicking and sobbing.

"All you can do is throw your words around and act like you can make everything better, when you know you CAN'T!" he screamed, straight into Bruce's ear, so loudly that he cried out in pain. "You're a spoiled playboy who lost one thing in your entire life! _One!_ I—Jonathan never had _anything_, and you think you know a damn thing about him?! You don't know ANYTHING!"

Ears ringing, he shifted his hold to Scarecrow's upper arms, flipped him so that he could pin the man's body with his legs. "Stop it!"

"DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" He was like a child throwing a tantrum, but wild like this, he had far more power than a child, enough to make Bruce have to strain to contain him. "I'm not Jonathan! I won't be manipulated, and I won't let you control me!"

"I'm not trying to control you." He tried to stay calm. Under the circumstances, it was much easier said than done. "I'm trying to help you."

"_Liar_!" He managed to sound more immature than frightening, like a six year-old Jonathan. "You've never helped him!"

"I've helped Jonathan more than you." It was absolutely the wrong thing to say, but he hardly had the energy to expend on scrutinizing his word choice. Scarecrow reacted like a demon confronted with holy water, writhing and shrieking.

"You _poisoned _him! He may have forgiven you for that, but I won't! _Not ever! _You had the fucking antidote and you didn't give it to him! You gave it to everybody else in the entire goddamn city, but it was fine for you to ruin my life because—" And he stopped, immediately, face going white. It took Bruce longer than it should have to figure out why. His word choice.

_My _life. Not Jonathan's, though he'd been talking about the poisoning in relation to Jonathan. _Like a six year-old Jonathan. _He'd never put two and two together before. Scarecrow wasn't a hallucination, as he'd assumed. His thoughts before being bitten were right. They weren't that different; because they were the _same. _Scarecrow was just the side that held the anger, and the fear of being hurt again.

Scarecrow was the one he had to reach out to, tame, in order to make this work. "I'm sorry that I poisoned you. It was wrong. I know that doesn't help, but—"

"It _wasn't _me!" He resumed struggling, tears shining over his pale skin.

"It's—"

"_I don't want to talk to you_!" He managed a kick to Bruce's leg, hard enough to numb the surrounding area after the flash of pain. "I don't trust you! I don't like you! LET GO!"

He pulled him up, wrapping Scarecrow's torso in a bear hug to prevent movement. "I want us to get along. All of us. I want to help you too." Most of him, anyway. Part of him still wanted Scarecrow to disappear forever, but this encounter had proved that would be counterproductive.

"I HATE YOU!"

But he couldn't, because Jonathan didn't, and they were the same person. "I'm not like the Joker. You don't have to worry about being betrayed. I promise."

"You don't know anything about me!" Scarecrow struggled again, but from his current position, he couldn't get the movement to do any real damage. "You don't have any deeper insight into me just because your parents got shot and stop acting like you do!"

"I know that you want to keep Jonathan safe, and you're afraid that I'll hurt you like everyone else." Why the hell was he trying psychology on a psychiatrist? It was only making him cry harder. "And that you're angry, for the things I'm done. I'm sorry. I won't hurt you again."

"You're hurting me NOW!"

"I'm not going to try and replace you. Don't worry."

Something about that statement made the fight go out of him, and he went limp, his sobs loud and gasping. Bruce risked drawing him closer to his shoulder, the one facing away from the stitches, and rubbing his back. "I hate you."

"That's all right."

"I _hate _you. I hate that I'm here with you and I hate that you rebuilt your life with so much anger and I hate that you're acting like you care and you're trying to steal my Jonathan and I _hate _you."

"I do care. I want you to feel safe, and I want to be with the both of you. You don't have to be afraid of being replaced, or hurt. Not anymore."

"Go to hell."

Bruce didn't answer. He let him sit there, crying, and when he raised his head, Alfred was standing in the entryway. God only knew how long he'd been watching. He didn't say anything, though, only gave Bruce a blanket and went back upstairs as Bruce wrapped it around Scarecrow's shaking shoulders, stroking his hair.

_

* * *

_

Jonathan?

Scarecrow had been crying for at least half an hour, long enough that it was starting to hurt their body. Jonathan was still in a state of shock: Scarecrow hadn't had the control to keep his emotions and thoughts blocked during the fight. The anger, he'd expected, but the fear, the self-loathing, the desire…he hadn't expected. And he was disgusted with himself for not picking up on it, stuck with no idea despite his doctorate of how to help. He'd left it to Bruce. He couldn't tell if it was working. _Yes?_

_Do you think he's telling the truth?_

He decided it was best to be honest. _Yes, I do._

Scarecrow considered it. The hate and anger were still there, but mixed with other things. A vortex of emotions. Jonathan couldn't tell which side was winning. _Jonathan?_

_Yes?_

_I don't know if I hate him anymore._

_Okay._ Given the circumstances, he'd lost the energy to jump for joy.

"Jonathan?"

He raised his head, and Bruce kissed his cheek. "Yes?"

"Is Scarecrow okay?"

"He's…" Conflicted? Terrified? Been hiding things from me this whole time? "Thinking."

Bruce nodded, kissed him on the mouth this time. Jonathan pulled away as he became aware of a sensation below his abdomen, an awkward one that he did not want Bruce to notice. Scarecrow was conflicted, but he was still sexually attracted, and all this contact hadn't helped in the slightest. He tried to slide off Bruce's lap, but Bruce shifted as he did, and his erection ended up brushing against the man's side. _Shit. _Maybe he hadn't noticed.

Bruce looked down, eyes widening a little. So much for that. "Jonathan?"

Blushing like mad, he pulled free, standing. "I a man, you know. Even if I am mad, I still have needs just like everyone else, and I'd prefer if we just didn't talk about it right now. I'm sorry. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be in the bathroom until certain issues are resolved, so—"

"Jonathan." He was smirking, damn him.

"What?"

Bruce had a wry sort of smile Jonathan had never seen before. He paused, a bit of worry slipping into his face, as if debating whether or not to say something. "Want help?"


	95. Together

AN: I'd like to say I've been studying for finals, but the truth is that I've been studying the art of smut writing. I decided after a fic that could be described as a ninety-four chapter cock tease up to this point, I ought to at least follow the laws of physics and/or not suck horribly. Though whether it's actually good is something that I, being asexy, feel I'm not qualified to say.

In other news, I'm going to the C2E2 comic con in Chicago this April, so if any of you are going and see a Harley Quinn carrying a Joker doll, it might just be me.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"What?"

Jonathan's expression was a number of things, and none of them good: shock, embarrassment, and nervousness. There might have been anger, as well, and Bruce couldn't say that he blamed him. _What the hell was I thinking?_ Jonathan was aroused, true, and as Bruce had found during the make out session on the bed, there was hardly a lack of physical attraction on his side, but there was a time and a place to proposition your boyfriend, and while he was crying and having a breakdown was not it. Especially when said boyfriend was an escaped mental patient suffering from something like but not quite dissociative identity disorder, and was legally unable to give consent in the first place.

All in all, not his smartest move.

He blamed his libido—not that it was an excuse—which, since the moment he'd discovered Jonathan's predicament, had been overriding the rest of his mind from the task of calming Jonathan down by bombarding him with images of what his partner would look like lying on the bed, just as vulnerable and needy, only without clothing. True, Jonathan at his most tormented was all the more adorable, but that was no excuse for insensitivity unto sociopathy.

Besides, for all he knew, Scarecrow still hated him. Bruce had lost count of the number of times Jonathan or Scarecrow—or maybe both, many had occurred before he knew the difference—had ended up hugging, holding, or crying on him, only to be hateful or cold once they let go. He'd been repeating how much he hated Bruce _while _being held, for God's sake. Brilliant. Just…brilliant. _Well, the good news is, I came to a deeper understanding of my boyfriend's psychoses and might have made progress in getting closer to the side of him that's still hostile to me. The bad news is, I then immediately ruined it by coming onto him in his time of need._

"It's nothing. Never mind, I was being stupid. I'm sorry." As if that would resolve the issue. Jonathan needed understanding more than anything—apart from a licensed psychiatrist—right now, and instead of offering it, he'd allowed the blood flow to his genitals to overpower common sense and human decency. _Worst boyfriend ever._

Jonathan wouldn't meet his eye, face even redder than it had been when Bruce had noticed his arousal. "I—I need a moment. Alone."

_Fuck. _"Wait, I—" Jonathan was halfway up the stairs by the time he stammered that out. Not that it mattered. Bruce was at a loss for anything to say in the first place. _Sorry I'm an insensitive ass? _He waited until Jonathan was out of sight before he followed, without knowing _why _he was following. He intended to give Jonathan privacy, just, what? Wanted to be nearby? His only consolation was that, of all his fuck-ups throughout their relationship, this one was relatively minor. Or so he hoped, anyway.

_

* * *

_

_Oh good God in heaven I can't believe he said that._

Jonathan locked the door to the master bathroom, several thousand thoughts racing through his mind—why the hell had he locked himself in the room directly attached to Bruce's bedroom, the thought "Oh good God in heaven I can't believe he said that" needed a comma but he hadn't put one in, his eyes burned from crying and his body ached from the stress and the effort and the blood flow to erogenous zones, and what if Bruce followed him up here out of worry, forced his way in like he had the time with the mirror, what would he say—but he couldn't focus on any of them, only _did he really offer that?_

_He did. _Scarecrow's tone was flat. He wasn't blocking the emotions; Jonathan could feel that their connection was open. There simply wasn't an emotion to be sensed. Scarecrow seemed to be emptied of them.

Jonathan shifted from his current position, half-sitting on the edge of the sink, to lean forward and embrace his other half. It was one of the rare times when he was glad that his alter ego wasn't material. That would have made the hugging with unintentional arousal thing all the more awkward, and he was uncomfortable enough as it was. _Scarecrow…_ He hadn't known how frightened his other half was, not only he'd shouted it all at Bruce. Jonathan wasn't sure which hurt more; the realization, or his ignorance toward it. _I'm sorry I ignored you. It…it was the first time anyone outside of us cared so completely. I got caught up…I'm sorry._

_I should have told you. _He sounded resigned, not angry, and the links were open as ever, so Jonathan knew nothing was being concealed. He couldn't remember ever seeing Scarecrow like this, so listless, and it was as disturbing as the outburst. _I'm sorry. It wouldn't have been so bad, then. Jonathan?_

_Yes?_

A moment's hesitation. _He…Bat—Br—Batman._

_Uh-huh? _He stroked Scarecrow's hair, waiting. _What about him?_

_Can we trust him? _It was an honest question, tinged with nothing but worry.

He took his time before answering, not because he thought they couldn't, but because he didn't want to answer without examining all the possibilities. It would be unfair to Scarecrow, after how dismissive he'd been of his alter ego's concerns. _I think that we can. I mean that._

_I don't hate him anymore, _Scarecrow said, as he had downstairs. _But…I don't know if I like him, either. I…he does this—_And here Scarecrow gave a pointed look down at the front of their jeans—_and I like that, but I don't know how I feel._

_That's okay. _It felt so alien, being the one who served as protector, but it was a role he would take without complaint. Scarecrow had kept him safe, to the best of his ability, for their entire life. He owed him this much; not that he was doing it out of a sense of obligation. Scarecrow was the most important person in his life and always would be, and if that meant putting things with Bruce on the back burner until he was comfortable, it would have to be done. He could survive without kissing or hugging, or anything else that would make his other half feel—

_I want to do it._

_What?_ Jonathan straightened, startled—the friction of movement was _not _helping the blood flow issue—and stared. Scarecrow's tone of voice—and the emotions coming through the link—suggested…suggestive things, but that _couldn't _be what he meant, not after the yelling fit, not given his ambivalent feelings—

_I want to have sex with him. _Scarecrow blushed, and what little blood that wasn't between their legs went to their cheeks.

_I…what? _He'd once heard being confronted with unabashed honesty compared to staring into the sun, and certainly it was just as dizzying here. _You…we've…I thought you didn't—_

_I want gratification. I've wanted it for weeks. _Scarecrow said, and it was true, but that didn't make the excuse any less hollow. _I want…to be with—no, to be _close _to someone. I want to feel…wanted._

"Wanted" didn't offend Jonathan, as he had enough insight to realize that it wasn't a slight against their relationship. Scarecrow didn't mean wanted as in acknowledged, but as in acknowledged _as a human being. _He felt his body tighten in apprehension. _I…if that's what you want._

_Not if you don't want it._

Jonathan considered it. Thought of Bruce's smile, his hands, the way he held Scarecrow while Scarecrow shrieked in his ear and the madness he'd endured during the entire relationship. Sex had never been much of a focus for him, even after his brushes with it during his time with the Joker, but Bruce…Bruce, he didn't mind being close to. _I think I want it, but…it's going to hurt, isn't it?_

_It can just hurt me, if you want._

He shook his head. They needed to share from now on, or risk going back to the fiasco of miscommunication that had just come to a head. _Can we do it together?_

Scarecrow, after a moment's thought, nodded, and Jonathan, shivering in spite of his very heated body, unlocked the door.

* * *

**AN: There is more to this chapter**, though it's not necessary to read the rest to follow the plot, and I've chosen not to post it on Fanfiction due to the sexual content. There's nothing hardcore or highly graphic, but since the guidelines for M fics on site are vague (non-explicit adult themes, and I'm not sure what they consider explicit), I've chosen not to post it here, because it's not worth having the story deleted if someone objects. If you'd like to read the rest of the chapter, it's available here on my livejournal (obviously, it will contain sex): lauralot. livejournal. com/ 7842. html#cutid2

If you have a livejournal account and want to review the chapter, you're welcome to do it there, but if not, I'd prefer that you review through Fanfiction, as it makes it easier to reply.

If you prefer not to read the scene, then you can still proceed to the next chapter without losing a greater sense of the plot. All you need to know is that a sexual encounter took place.


	96. Hot Georgian Lovin'

AN: Sorry for the long disappearance. As it turns out, eighteen credit hours as opposed to sixteen, though it's only one more class, makes finals week completely unbearable. On the plus side, I think I just aced my Latin final and finally understood the language for the first time since last year. Friday night, I arrived home fairly lately, and all of yesterday was spent at a Christmas party with my relatives/looking at an animal shelter because my mom decided she wanted another cat(s). We're picking one up on Monday, and possibly another later in the week.

For those who are wondering about this chapter's title, one of my awesome reviewers (everyone who reviews is awesome, by the way), Lily Mae Ray, has a habit of referring to Bruce/Jonathan lovemaking as "hot Georgian lovin'" in her reviews, as Jonathan is from Georgia, and upon first seeing the phrase, after giggling like an idiot, I decided I had to use that term somewhere in this fic. This is the last chapter with any smut to it, I think, and it's much shorter than the last one.

Oh, for those who have me on Author Alert, if you're wondering why TKATP and STWSA are reporting themselves as updated, I did that to put them back in order after disrupting it by accidentally updating AT a while ago. There isn't actually a new chapter.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

Bruce glanced at the alarm clock and wished, for what had to be the thirtieth time, that he could sleep. He wasn't sure why he kept glancing at the alarm; it wasn't as though having a visual reminder of the minutes ticking by would help with relaxation. It shouldn't concern him, as he didn't have anywhere to be in the morning, and could stay in bed as long as he wanted, provided he ever did drift off. But time wasn't the issue.

The fact that he was in bed—like _this_—was.

Jonathan lay sleeping beside him—lucky—a pair of Bruce's silk pajamas draped, oversized, across his small frame. It had been one of Bruce's first actions after he'd found he was unable to sleep, remembering Jonathan's complaints about the mansion's temperature, after he'd cleaned the two of them off. Himself, by rinsing off in the shower, and Jonathan, with a washcloth, because the last thing he wanted to risk was his boyfriend waking up in the bath. Pointless, really, considering that the sheets needed to be changed—he shuddered to think of Alfred's reaction—so cleaning themselves off was a pointless battle, but the purpose of an action didn't matter when it can to insomnia, just the fact that there _was_ action.

He'd considered taking the sheets off the bed and doing the laundry himself, but the only thing less appealing than the prospect of Alfred washing the sheets was the thought of Alfred catching him in the act of removing the evidence. Besides, he had no idea where the detergent was since Alfred had locked up all the chemicals.

It had been wonderful, yes. And given the choice, he would do it again. Bruce didn't regret it…not quite. Regret wasn't the right word. But the side of him that had argued against this from the beginning kept bringing up everything wrong about it. Not just the illegality, everything. His concerns about Jonathan's mental state, alienating Alfred, the fact that there was no way this could work in the long term, at least, not the way they were going, for all he knew, Scarecrow still hated him, everything. _What was I thinking?_

Beside him, Jonathan yawned, rolling over to lie against him.

It did nothing to assuage his misgivings, but it was adorable enough to distract him, if only for a minute. "What am I going to do with you?"

Jonathan only moved closer, and with a sigh, Bruce stroked the hair back from his partner's face.

* * *

Someone was brushing his hair back.

He could not make out who was touching him; it was hard enough just focusing on the hand. Scarecrow closed his eyes, opened them again. In the real world, his vision would be blurred as ever, as the glasses were off. But judging by the feel of the surface below him—like a floor, not a bed—and the room's brightness, this was another dream, and blinking did serve to make things clearer. Possibly by forcing all the straw or rot or whatever it was from his eyes, though there had been no such sensation when he blinked.

From the feel of floorboards beneath him, and the scent of dust and mildew, he was back in Georgia. That should have upset him. Scarecrow imagined it would, if not for the lack of demonic apparitions, frightening noises, and air of foreboding the manor had held in all of his other nightmares. This did not feel like a nightmare. It did not feel like anything, really. He wondered if this was how a dream, an ordinary one, felt.

The hand was still there. He followed it, up to the wrist, the arm, the shoulder, the body, the face. Bruce Wayne, sitting in the bedroom Scarecrow had shared with Jonathan as a child, stroking his hair. There was a smile on the billionaire's face, not malicious or mischievous or anything but genuine. Scarecrow was not sure if he trusted it. He was still trying to decide how to feel about this when another hand appeared in his line of vision, this one open, offering to help him up. This one belonged to Jonathan.

"Sit with us."

Scarecrow glanced at the floor. The blood was still there, as well as the grime, but he did not feel the sensation of bleeding any more, or things burrowing under his skin. He raised a hand, not to take Jonathan's, but to examine his own. The torn places had been sewn back together with tight black stitches, giving the appearance of little scars not unlike Jonathan's. The skin itself looked healthier as well, and though he could not see inside, he imagined there was new straw.

He licked his lips; realized there was no stitching running through them. He was not sure what that meant, or what to think of it.

Jonathan took one of his hands, and Bruce Wayne took the other, as they pulled him to sit upright between them. His shirt was stained with blood as well, and coated in the filth from the floor, but he was being held on either side, the right by the person he cared about more than anyone in the world, and the left by a man that he was not sure how to feel about, beyond that he had nice hands and was good in bed. He was in the manor that he hated even more than Bruce Wayne's mansion, filthy, covered in stitches, and, for all he knew, still rotting on the inside, and he ought to feel furious with the both of them, Jonathan for abandoning him and letting him bleed out on the floor, and Bruce Wayne for ruining everything, but at the moment, all he wanted to do was hold back, so he did.

* * *

There was light drifting in from the gap between the blinds; not much, but enough to let Scarecrow know that it was morning. It occurred to him that he could do with more sleep, but he refused to roll over and close his eyes. He didn't want to risk dreaming again. It didn't matter that it had been a good dream, for once. The fact of the matter was that he wasn't _supposed _to dream. Never had, until they'd come here, and never wanted to again.

Jonathan was the dreamer, and if the line between them was blurring here, God only knew where else it was blurring. The thought of nonexistence terrified him. It wouldn't matter if all was said and done, as he'd lack the self-awareness to _know _that he'd ceased to exist, but he didn't care if it would inconvenience him in the future or not. He refused to let it happen.

"Bad dream?"

Scarecrow jumped; felt Batman's warm hands hold him in response, as they had in the dream. As comforting as a touch from someone who threatened his existence and whom he'd just stopped hating could be, he supposed, but still. "Christ, Batman. Do you make a habit of hovering over unconscious people?"

"Bruce." He sounded almost stern before he switched to embarrassedly apologetic. "And I haven't been able to sleep. Sorry. Are you all right?"

He sighed, wound his fingers through his hair. "I'm shouldn't be dreaming at all." He wasn't sure why he was saying it. Not because Batman suddenly seemed so trusting and loving and compassionate. Scarecrow's distrust and envy and all of that was still there, dream or not, sex or not. But if he couldn't vent this frustration to _someone_—and he couldn't to Jonathan, because he didn't want to inflict the guilt—it was going to tear him to shreds, the way he'd been coming apart at the seams in his nightmares.

"Why not?" Genuine concern, and Scarecrow couldn't decide if he felt relieved or infuriated. God, even being with the Joker hadn't been this much of a mindfuck.

"Because _Jonathan _has dreams." His tone implied that it should be obvious, though he knew it wouldn't be. He hated the flicker of guilt he felt at setting the Bat up to fail.

"You don't?"

He let out another frustrated sigh, shaking his head.

"Maybe you do and you just don't remember it?"

His eyes flew open, narrowing immediately after. "I think I'd remember, Batman."

"Bruce. And you're supposed to protect Jonathan, aren't you?"

"I _do_ protect him." Batman might not have intended it as a slight, but it still stung.

"Right, but if you're supposed to be the protector, and comfort him after bad experiences, maybe nightmares count as a part of that?" He brushed the hair away from Scarecrow's face and Scarecrow, remembering the dream, turned to his side. "I mean, it'd be hard to reassure him from a nightmare if you were afraid too, so you taught yourself to block out that sort of thing?"

It made sense, though Scarecrow refused to admit it. "I don't care why it's happening. I just want it to stop." He began to sit up, felt an odd sensation against his body, and stopped. "Are these your pajamas?"

A nod. That would explain why he didn't feel sweaty and disgusting, then. Still weird. "Whatever. I'm taking a shower."

* * *

Scarecrow emerged from the bathroom, rubbing his hair dry with a towel, clad again in Bruce's clothing. The silk pants barely clung to his hips, and covered his feet completely. It was a wonder he didn't trip. It was also, quite possibly, the cutest thing ever. The last thing Bruce wanted to do was disrupt their truce, or whatever it was, by speaking, but that was also the thing he needed to do the most. "Scarecrow?"

"Mmm?"

"Can we talk?"

He paused in the act of sliding his glasses back on, towel draped over his shoulders. "About what?"

"Last night."

His relaxed posture immediately tensed, like a dog lying in the grass that had just spotted a snake.

"I'm not angry." He held his hands out in a gesture of peace, which had no visible effect on Jonathan's other half whatsoever. "I don't want you to leave, or anything." Even if it would be better in the long run. Bruce didn't care, selfish as it was. "Just to talk. I want to know how you're feeling."

Still wary, Scarecrow sat on the foot of the bed, looking ready to bolt at any second. "I don't know."

_So we haven't made any big breaks in communication, then. _He shook his head, chiding himself. Pessimism wouldn't get them anywhere, and besides, for Scarecrow, a civil conversation _was _a breakthrough. "Because I meant what I said. About not trying to replace you."

A noncommittal shrug.

"I care about the both of you. Really."

"I liked the sex," Scarecrow offered. He didn't sound as if he was being sarcastic, or intentionally unhelpful.

Bruce smiled in spite of himself. "I liked that part too. But I like spending time with you that isn't sex, you know. I'm not all that bad, am I?"

Another shrug. "I don't hate you. Not anymore. But…I don't know. You're nice, I guess. That doesn't make me less angry about the toxin or anything else."

It would be selfish to expect that Jonathan would be over that. Bruce had, after all, robbed him of what little sanity he had left, and his reputation and position on top of that. The fact that they'd ever gotten past the hatred was remarkable. "Can we take it one day at a time?"

A nod, this time. Scarecrow's head was down, and Bruce thought, for a moment, that he was staring at the sheets, before he spoke. "Can I hold your hand?"

"Yes." His hands, then, resting on his lap, were the focus of those electric eyes. Scarecrow's gaze never shifted as he crawled forward on the bed, took Bruce's hand in his. He didn't hold it; instead lifting Bruce's hand, holding it between his, pulling lightly on his fingers, and examining it from all angles. "You two really have a thing for my hands, don't you?"

"They're nice," Scarecrow protested, before lifting Bruce's hand, and, as Jonathan had done the night before, slipping Bruce's fingers into his mouth.

"Hey."

"Jonathan had his turn. This is mine." It was disturbing, how well he could enunciate between licking and sucking. And more than a little arousing.

"You were sharing." He was stalling and they both knew it. Having sex once had been bad enough, and crossing the line wasn't an invitation to cross it over and over again. And yet the glances Scarecrow was shooting him, and the suction his mouth was applying was sapping Bruce's resolve far too quickly. The Incorruptible Batman, brought down by a come hither look. Hopefully the other villains would never work that one out.

"Technicalities."

"This is a bad idea."

Scarecrow responded by nipping his fingers sharply, licking soothingly over the skin as Bruce tried to pull away.

"No biting."

He released Bruce's hand, pouting, as he leaned forward to bring their mouths together. "Fine. But I get to kiss all I want."

* * *

**AN: There is more to this chapter**, though it's not necessary to read the rest to follow the plot, and I've chosen not to post it on Fanfiction due to the sexual content. There's nothing hardcore or highly graphic, but since the guidelines for M fics on site are vague (non-explicit adult themes, and I'm not sure what they consider explicit), I've chosen not to post it here, because it's not worth having the story deleted if someone objects. If you'd like to read the rest of the chapter, it's available here on my livejournal (be advised, it obviously contains sex): lauralot. livejournal. com/ 8095. html#cutid2

If you have a livejournal account and want to review the chapter, you're welcome to do it there, but if not, I'd prefer that you review through Fanfiction, as it makes it easier to reply.

If you prefer not to read the scene, then you can still proceed to the next chapter without losing a greater sense of the plot. All you need to know is that a sexual encounter took place.


	97. Decision

AN: I can't decide if it's depressing, or, in a way, kind of commendable, that I consider not updating in a week and a day an ungodly long lapse of time. Anyway, I'm sorry that I've been updating about as quickly as molasses pours, especially considering that I've only planned a hundred chapters for this thing and it's taking forever and a day to get the last few out. By way of explanation, everybody remember the whole wisdom tooth extraction thing? Well, the heavy duty pain medication from that made me sick, (and I needed it too much to stop taking it) and only in the last two days have I felt anything approaching well enough to sit down and type. Speaking of which, my worries about waking up were entirely unfounded. As it turns out, the nurses couldn't wake me in the operating room, or by dragging me down the hall, or in the recovery room, and my mother couldn't either, even when she used physical force. My sister could, eventually, and it is things like these that make her the inspiration for my Joker.

In other news, we now have two kittens: Loki (http:/ i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ 100_0003. jpg) and Athena (http:/ i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ 100_0004. jpg), and yes, I know I'm mixing mythologies with those names. If I'd had my way, they'd be Loki and Freyja. Actually, if I'd had my way, they'd be Bruce and Selina, but that was shot down all too quickly.

And before I end this author's note and get to the story you've all been waiting way too long to return to, Lily Mae Ray, once again being super special awesome, made the following fan art which I command everyone to go admire: i158. photobucket. com/ albums/ t92/ Lauralot/ SS-TheKnightAndTheScarecrow-by-6Ann. jpg

Thanks for the reviews (and the patience), and a belated Merry Christmas to all!

* * *

Considering their hatred of bathtubs, and the previous traumatic experiences they'd had in this particular room, Scarecrow was pleasantly surprised to find that the master bathroom was, upon closer inspection, his favorite part of all of Wayne Manor. At least, it would be if there was some way to fit the master bed—greatest bed _ever_—through the door, but he only wasted a few seconds considering the logistics of that before dismissing it as not worth the effort and becoming distracted by how _cool _this place was. Once he stopped being busy with hating Bruce and everything else about their imprisonment, it was impossible to miss. There were about eleven thousand light switches controlling the lights around the sink and the shower and overhead, and all of them could go dim or full or have half the row light up.

The bathtub was probably large enough to accommodate the bed, come to think of it—not that he'd put it there; that would be stupid—as was the mirror, and Bruce had loofahs and actual sea sponges and shampoos that probably cost as much as an ordinary person's mortgage payments. And body scrubs that smelled wonderful just like him.

The shower head was detachable, as Scarecrow noted when he finally stopped admiring the room and got to cleaning himself off. The next few minutes were spent, rather than bathing, recalling the time the Joker had read _Cosmopolitan _articles aloud in Arkham's rec room, and the one that had been about detachable shower heads and all the fun things girls could do with them. He wondered if men enjoyed similar benefits, and if so, whether or not inviting Bruce in would be asking for a panic attack.

_You seem to have gotten over the "hating Bruce" thing rather quickly._

_What can I say? I'm a romantic._

_More of a nymphomaniac. _Jonathan shifted, obviously uncomfortable despite his attempts to hide it. Maybe he wasn't enjoying the time spent admiring the bathtub. Scarecrow couldn't stay that he blamed him, and began bathing.

_Excuse me for liking sex. _And a boyfriend with so much stamina; Scarecrow wanted nothing more than to go make up for all the years they'd been missing out. _This is great, Jonathan. He's good in bed, he's beautiful, and he has great hands. Not to mention the billionaire-ness._

_Scarecrow._

_I mean, he's _rich. _Which, by extension, makes us rich. Which means the world is our oyster. _

_Scarecrow._

He'd always hated the glimpses they'd caught of extravagant celebrities on television; a reminder of all they didn't have and how they'd struggled just to break even. The part where Jonathan had become an unemployed, escaped criminal hadn't helped either. But now that he had all that…well, he wouldn't mind his own private jet. Or a yacht. He didn't swim, hated water, and never planned to sail, but that wasn't the point of a yacht. The point of a yacht was to have a yacht.

He wondered if Bruce had a yacht.

_Scarecrow!_

Scarecrow opened his eyes—wishing he hadn't as soap stung them—startled. _What?_

_Would you stop planning your personal Petit Trianon and talk to me? _He sounded just this side of panicked. So it hadn't been the bath that was worrying him.

_What's wrong?_

_How is this going to work?_

The water felt cold at that. It was clear what he was talking about; much as Scarecrow wished he could play dumb. _What do you mean? _He tried not to sound defensive, or confrontational. He was in no mood to start another power struggle when they'd just gotten back on friendly, honest terms. _This _is _working, Jonathan. We're sharing, and Bruce loves both of us, so if we just stay talking to each other then—_

_Long term, Scarecrow._

He was off balance, the way it felt when they were overmedicated. _Talking doesn't work in the long term?_

_I'm a wanted criminal. _Jonathan stalked inside the confines of their mind like a caged animal, winding his hair painfully tight in his hands. _It's not like we can go to restaurants or parties or go skiing or whatever else socialites do without someone noticing. The disguise won't work forever, and I won't always be satisfied with walking around the back yard. Will you?_

_I—_ He hadn't thought of that, given the time he'd spent being preoccupied by the threat of nonexistence, and later, the wonderful, wonderful sensation of the sexual tension finally being resolved. Neither of them were particularly fond of the outdoors, preferring a good book or test subject to the wilderness, but the thought of never walking down the sidewalk on one of Gotham's rare nice days, or admiring the leaves in autumn, or the scenery of the city when the snow lasted…no. No, it couldn't satisfy him _Bruce—we—we could go by an assumed name?_

_No._ Jonathan was immediate, unexpectedly forceful. _My name is the one thing I have left, and even if it's tarnished, I'm keeping it._

Scarecrow nodded, silent. It might not have been the most logical line of thinking, but he knew what the respect Jonathan had once held had meant to him. It ran in the family; this sort of pride—his great-grandmother had felt the same way. Turning his mind from nostalgia best left hidden in memory, he raced through other possibilities. _We could use a better disguise…not plastic surgery, but a new hairstyle, or color, or—_

_It still wouldn't work. Not with how much I've been on the news, and how often Bruce is in the limelight. Imagine the publicity from the "dating a man" angle alone._

Ouch. Scarecrow hadn't even thought of the wrench _that _would throw in the works. _Well, you could disguise yourself as his new girlfriend—_

_No._

He hadn't expected Jonathan to agree, not at all, but he couldn't help but feel disheartened at the disappearance of another option. They couldn't appear in public freely, that much was clear, not in Gotham. And Bruce would never leave this place. He couldn't give up Batman anymore than Scarecrow could give up Jonathan. Which meant the only way to be with him would be returning to Arkham, serving out God knows how many years of a sentence. No. _What if…Bruce could arrange for someone to see us, some doctor, pay him off to declare you sane?_

_I don't think Bruce would do that. _Their heart sank. Scarecrow couldn't tell which of them had felt the sudden wave of despair to cause it. Either way, Jonathan was right. Bruce thought they were insane. He wasn't above lying to the public about his own activities, but if he thought it was harmful, Scarecrow doubted it would happen. _Besides, I was court-ordered to Arkham. I doubt it's that easy._

_Unless we can change the court's mind. _He bit his lip, the bar of soap in his hand forgotten as he tried to formulate an idea. _Could…is there any way Bruce can vouch for us? Tell the court that he knows us, use his power and influence to have you treated privately?_

_Maybe. _A flicker of hope, quickly extinguished. _But that would mean telling everyone that we've been living with him. And he can't make it sound as if I was holding him hostage, or the harmless angle won't fly. There'd be an uproar, and even if he could keep his name from being tarnished, keep it out of the public, I doubt there'd be much room for negotiations after that._

Which left going back to Arkham. Scarecrow felt himself shake, legs threatening to give out from under him. No. Jonathan would never agree to that, and they both knew it. He hated Arkham; hated the guards, the doctors and their so-called insights, the majority of the other patients, the food, everything. But beyond that, Scarecrow hated it.

Scarecrow feared it.

He'd never mentioned it to Jonathan—which, of course, didn't mean Jonathan was oblivious, but they'd never discussed it—but doctors frightened him. Ridiculous, considering he shared his mind with a psychiatrist, but not irrational. Far from it. Growing up, doctors meant the threat of being removed from his great-grandmother's home, should the one they infrequently visited discover signs of abuse. That shouldn't have been a bad thing, especially considering that Scarecrow didn't share the reluctant affection for the old bitch that Jonathan did. But…leaving the house meant a chance at happiness. And that meant no more need for Scarecrow, or so he'd thought. So selfish as it was, he'd wanted to stay.

And now that they were considered unwell, doctors meant psychiatrists. Psychiatrists that would call their relationship dissociative identity disorder. And psychiatrists were not, from what he'd witnessed, accepting of abnormalities. Jonathan had studied dissociative identity disorder. He remembered the cases, thought of Shirley Ardell Mason and her sixteen personalities that had saved her from suicide multiple times. And how had they been repaid? Reintegration. Loss of freedom, of separate personality. Of life, really.

He hated doctors.

_Maybe it'll be okay. Somehow._

_It won't. _He was resolute.

_So what do we do?_

Jonathan took control, shut off the water. _I need advice._

_From who?_

* * *

Jonathan cleared his throat.

The butler didn't look up, making a point of seeming entirely focused on sorting the mail. Perhaps he was.

Jonathan doubted it. "Excuse me?"

He looked up then. His expression was not hateful, far from it. Rather, it was a wholly British look of disapproval, at best, which nonetheless perfectly portrayed his loathing. "Was there something you wanted, Dr. Crane?"

What he wanted was to leave the room at a brisk pace and take shelter in a different room. The butler seemed a civil person, at least, not the sort that would go locking children in aviaries and let the crows have a go at them, but his quiet disgust was entirely too reminiscent of Jonathan's great-grandmother. "I." He stopped, swallowed, started again. He couldn't seem weak. "May I talk to you?"

"If you must." Maddening, really, how he could be so blunt while sounding so polite. Jonathan would be envious if that wasn't one of his own talents.

Against all instincts, Jonathan sat down. "I need advice," he said, aware that his face was flaming but entirely unable to stop it.

The man raised an eyebrow for the slightest of seconds before composing himself. "Well, I don't have a professional medical opinion, but I am certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid, and going by that, I'd recommend you return to Arkham."

Jonathan was torn between wanting to say something terribly clever—that just wouldn't come to mind, damn it—and being impressed. "I'd thank you for your insight, but you haven't heard the problem."

"I doubt my mind will change," the butler said wryly. "May I ask why you aren't asking Master Wayne?"

"He's asleep." It occurred to Jonathan that the bed sheets carried the evidence of last night's excursions and it took all he had not to faint on the spot. "And I need an im—" Well, the butler was _far _from impartial. "Someone not as close to the situation."

Another raise of the eyebrow, and Jonathan nearly _did _lose consciousness. _Bad, bad choice of words._ Scarecrow, for once, was mercifully quiet.

"The situation being?"

"I. Um." _Fuck. _Why in the name of all things scientific did he not _plan _what he was going to ask before he asked it? The only way this could get any worse would be if he immediately blurted out "I've been fucking Bruce and it's fantastic!" Which he was not about to do. Probably.

Scarecrow snorted.

"I. Look, at this point, I think we're both aware that Bruce and I have feelings. For each other."

"Much as I would like to pretend otherwise."

He swallowed again. "Right. Well, as it is, there's discontent on all sides—"

"Can't imagine why."

Jonathan tried very hard to ignore that, and continued. "And I need your opinion on how to resolve it. Look," he added, before there could be another dig at his mental stability, "I know this relationship is a bad idea, all right? And I know that you hate me, and frankly, I don't have the fondest feelings for you either, but that's beside the point. I'm a risk to Bruce and I know it, but I love him, and I'm not ending this. Not unless we decide it, together, and I don't care how you feel about it, because selfish as it is, Bruce is the best thing that's ever happened to me and I intend to keep him unless he tells me otherwise."

He paused for breath, afraid to look up. But Scarecrow forced him. The butler's expression was unreadable. "If you've made up your mind, Dr. Crane, what did you need my counsel for?"

"Because I know it can't work this way." Tears came to his eyes, but for once he was able to keep them from coming out. "Not with me as a wanted criminal unable to leave the manor. It _can't_, no matter how hard we try."

"Then it seems to me the decision would be obvious."

"But I—I don't want to go back to Arkham." He knew it sounded like whining. It was whining. That didn't change a thing. He _hated _Arkham. The only place that was a more visceral reminder of his trauma than Arkham was the manor in Georgia, and he never intended to set foot in that again either.

"Dr. Crane."

Again, Scarecrow forced him to look up. He still couldn't read the butler's expression. At least it wasn't outwardly condescending, or hateful. "Yes?"

"I don't like you. I won't deny that. You are a threat to this manor, this family, Master Wayne's secret, and above all, his sanity. You try to kill Miss Dawes, threatened and tortured countless others." The butler paused.

Jonathan didn't argue.

"But that isn't why I'm saying you should go back to the asylum."

_I'll bet. _Scarecrow thought it. Jonathan wished he could agree.

"You admit that this…affair—" His expression was pained, there. "Won't work, as it is. I'll give you that. Grudgingly, of course, but I'll give it to you. If that's the case, Dr. Crane, if you truly do love him, you must take the steps to make it work. He can't do that for you. Only you can take responsibility for yourself."

He felt himself nod without wanting to, throat suddenly sore. It was much harder to hide the tears now. "There isn't any other way?"

"If there was," said the butler, softly, "you'd have thought of it by now, wouldn't you?"

There were footsteps behind him, before he could answer, someone walking into the kitchen. A yawn. "Morning, Alfred. Jonathan."

"Afternoon, Master Wayne." He didn't miss a beat.

"Really?" Another few steps, before a pause. Bruce had apparently noticed the oddness of the two of them in a room together, at the table without eating. "Did I miss something?"

"Bruce." Scarecrow didn't will him to turn around, and he wasn't sure how he managed on his own. Certainly not out of wanting it. "I need to go back to Arkham."

* * *

AN: The _Petit Trianon _was a retreat of Marie Antoinette's. I always thought Scarecrow would be a "Let them eat cake" sort of rich person. Unintentionally, but still.

Shirley Ardell Mason is the real name of Sybil Dorsett, of the famous book and film _Sybil._

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what year or month _The Dark Knight _occurred? I'm trying to work out the timeline for my next story, and I can't seem to find that bit of information anywhere.


	98. Return

AN: So after reading _Scarecrow: Year One_ (a Christmas gift) I have to say that I love the fact that Jonathan's childhood bedroom a) looks like it was decorated for a little girl and b) has a teddy bear the size of a full-grown adult. As for the story itself, I wish there'd been more of Jonathan's interactions Batman, as well as with his mother, but it wasn't bad. Certainly better than the Two-Face origin comic that came with it. I also received the first volume of _No Man's Land _and I must say that any comic which features Scarecrow kicking ass and taking names, only to be defeated by the power of love, wins in my book. And that I will be referring to Bats as "Lord Batman" mentally for quite some time now.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

"What?"

There were good ways to start the morning—afternoon, if he wanted to be technical—such as the days when he woke up uninjured. Or late in the day, with no obligations, or after stopping a particularly dangerous madman or important mob deal. There were average starts to the day, the usual business meetings and dinner parties and aches and pains. And then there were horrible mornings, usually marked by severe injury or a fiasco the night before, either as Batman, or socially.

Bruce was going to have to add coming across his boyfriend on the brink of tears and asking to be committed to that last list.

"Jonathan?"

"I need to go back to Arkham." The brink of tears didn't accurately describe it; Jonathan _was _crying. The tears just had yet to leave his eyes. "Bruce, this can't work. Not like this. I have to go back."

_What the hell? _It was a terribly unhelpful reaction, but the first thing to come to mind. Why did this keep happening? Every time, _every time _something in this relationship started to not be absolutely terrible, something came along to ruin it. But with Scarecrow—presumably—on their side and himself on the mend, Bruce had thought maybe, just maybe, things would be all right from here on out. Their interactions late last night and early this morning had indicated that it was more than all right, and he'd been so happy upon waking—after a few minutes spent frantically trying to scrub the evidence from the sheets—that he'd allowed himself to believe it would be okay.

This was the sin of presumption, then.

"Jonathan." He took the chair nearest to his partner, tried not to let his worry show. "What happened? Is Scarecrow—"

"Scarecrow doesn't want to go back." Jonathan lowered his head. Bruce couldn't tell if he'd begun crying or not. It was silent, if he had. "Neither of us do, I mean, but Scarecrow says he'd rather stay stuck in this house forever. I can't do that, Bruce. I can't spend my entire life hiding."

It was a thought that hadn't occurred to him, not more than a single snowflake in the avalanche of worries he got from time to time over their relationship. But now that he heard the same concern from Jonathan, it was as painful and apparent as the knife between his ribs had been. Unbelievable, that he'd been stabbed only a few days ago. It seemed an eternity, with all they'd been through.

He was holding Jonathan, and he couldn't say if he had moved to hug him, or if Jonathan positioned himself there while Bruce was busy guilting himself for being oblivious. Either way, he hugged back, feeling Jonathan's head on his shoulder. He wasn't sobbing, at least. That was something.

Christ. _Why couldn't this have waited?_ Again, selfish to the point of being repulsive, but Bruce couldn't bring himself to care. Of course Jonathan couldn't live like this, and he was stupid to think that it would work. He'd been blinding himself to so many problems from the moment he'd decided to act on his attraction, but damn it, they'd finally reached a point when it wasn't a struggle to express themselves without interference. Was it so much to ask, after all that had happened, for one perfect day?

Of course it was. This was Gotham. If there was anyone without troubles in Gotham, Bruce would like to learn that person's secret.

Still, Jonathan…well, not to be condescending to him, but Jonathan wasn't the type to recognize his own problems, not that Bruce had seen. For all his psychiatric insight—and he definitely had it, though he tended to use it in all the wrong ways—he never seemed to turn it back on himself. At least, not out loud. Remembering that Alfred was at the table, he looked up. No. Alfred wouldn't put him up to that, no matter how much he hated him. At least, not intentionally. "Did you say something to him about—"

"This isn't his fault, Bruce!" Jonathan's voice broke, his hold around Bruce's midsection tightening. He felt a tug on the stitches and didn't waste the energy it would take to worry about it. "I asked him for advice, but it's not like he told anything I didn't already know. I was worried before; that's why I talked to him. I—look, I don't know why I thought of it, I was just thinking and I started to worry about it and I couldn't stop and I have to go back. I don't _want _to." He buried his face against Bruce's shoulder, tears soaking through the fabric of the shirt. "But it's the only way we can be together without hiding it."

_He's right. _And that should have been the cue for Bruce to be proud of him, to put aside his own pain and support his boyfriend's decision to help himself. Rather, he found himself overcome by the urge to take Jonathan out, now, and go Batman on the ass of anyone who dared question it, law enforcement or otherwise. All right, so that wouldn't work. But it would be better than taking him back to that godawful asylum.

Bruce tightened his own hold in response, stitches positively burning. His free hand found the back of Jonathan's head and stroked his hair, mind racing. "Maybe it doesn't have to be Arkham. If I could influence—"

"We're talking about me, Bruce." He sounded bitter more than despondent now. "I might not be the Joker, but you can't say that the toxin in the water supply endeared me to this city."

"I know." _But I don't want to lose you._

_Pull yourself together. _It wasn't his libido that had spoken up, not this time, and nor was it the voice in his head that popped up whenever he was about to do something especially stupid or immoral. No, this was more from the Batman part of him, the part that knew, even when things got ugly, what had to be done and forced him to do them. Usually that made the rest of him weary. Bruce found himself welcoming it now. _He's recognized what has to be done. If you don't support him now, you'll be taking advantage._

"All right." He straightened up, hands on either side of Jonathan's face in response to a questioning look. "I…I won't pretend to like it, but if this is what will make you happy, then we need it."

Jonathan nodded as best he could, tears still spilling down his face. He looked heartbroken and determined and grateful all at once, and Bruce's heart ached at the pleading look in eyes. He had to be there for Jonathan, if only to keep himself from falling apart.

"When did you want me to take you there?"

* * *

"They let you have books in Arkham?" Bruce asked, holding the bag as Jonathan shoved hardbacks inside. Off the other's look, he added, "I meant your own. I didn't think personal items were allowed in there."

"Personal items that are deemed dangerous aren't." Jonathan wiped his reddened eyes with the back of one hand, sniffing quietly as he turned back to the box he'd been rifling through. Bruce hadn't expected him to leave today. But then, maybe he thought if he didn't go now, he'd never work up the nerve again.

It was taking all of Bruce's will power not to talk him out of it.

"And books aren't dangerous?"

He shook his head. "DVDs, CDs, anything with a sharp edge. Or ball point pens, pencils, shoes with laces, clothes with drawstrings, zippers, buttons, if the patient tends to swallow things. Not that it matters, since the court-ordered patients have to wear the jumpsuits."

"I thought everyone wore those."

"Not since the funding slipped. You're one of the only investors in that place, anymore."

_And I'm sending you back there. _He held his tongue. Arkham was a hellhole, yes, but some patients did recover. If Jonathan was trying, with all his brilliance, maybe he could accomplish that. Assuming, of course, that Scarecrow was on board with it. "How's Scarecrow?"

"Terrified." There was another loud sniff, and Bruce raised his head to find himself staring at the man in question. He sank down onto the bed, shoulders shaking, and Bruce set the bag down in order to take his hand.

"You'll be all right." It wasn't something he should promise, knowing Jonathan's history, and the sort of place that Arkham was. But he had nothing else to say, no other way to comfort him. He could pour more money in Arkham, maybe, expose as much of the corruption as he could, and put a stop to it, but he couldn't promise that it would turn out all right, anymore than he could reach inside his partner's mind and fix the damage.

"Jonathan might." His tone was acidic, though the shake to it betrayed that at least part of the venom was to mask worry. "If they find out about m-me—and Jonathan's shit at lying—they're not going to be okay with that."

"They might—"

"They _won't_, Bruce. They'll k-kill me."

He shifted his position on the bed to move closer, held so tightly that Scarecrow's breathing shallowed. "Did you study multiple personalities in grad school?"

Another sniff. "Y-yeah. And it always led to—"

"Were all the cases you read about in asylums?"

Scarecrow's brow furrowed. "What?"

"Were all the people you studied in an institution?"

"No." He wiped his eyes, nose wrinkling in confusion. "But they weren't court-ordered either."

"Right. The point is, you two won't be in Arkham forever. They won't _want _to keep you forever, pressed for money and space like they are." Bruce hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. "And I think they'll focus on the human experimentation before they focus on you. If neither of you are hurting anyone, they might leave you alone."

Scarecrow looked doubtful. "Shirley Mason was in therapy for eleven years. And they destroyed all of fifteen of her other personalities."

He thought of eleven years in Arkham and tried not to cringe. "She wasn't you. And she didn't have me supporting her, all right?"

He nodded, clinging to Bruce. "I still don't like it."

"Neither do I. But it'll be all right."

* * *

Bruce didn't take the car right up to the gates of Arkham, of course. That would be asking to be caught on camera, leading straight back to Bruce when the doctors got to wondering where Jonathan had been since his escape. But the building was in sight when the car came to a stop, dark and oppressive and looming over them. Even the architecture was hopeless. Jonathan wasn't one for omens, but if he was, he'd take that as a bad one.

"You're sure—"

"Don't ask me that." Harsher than he'd intended. He shook his head. "Sorry."

"No." Bruce turned the keys back in the ignition, stilling the engine. His eyes were glistening, and the visual forced Jonathan's own tears from his eyes. He'd been hiding them so well until that moment. "Don't be. It was a stupid thing to ask."

"Will you visit me?" He hated how weak his voice sounded.

"As often as I can." Bruce was crying. Well, one tear, but God. _Bruce _was crying. It was as if gravity had stopped applying. He didn't know how to react.

"Arkham, um." He swallowed. "Arkham doesn't allow visitors until after the first week there. To a-adjust." What a stupid thing to say. It wasn't as if Bruce Wayne, Prince of Gotham could start visiting him without raising suspicions and revealing the past. It would be Batman, and Batman wasn't held to visiting hours or restrictions.

Bruce only nodded.

"I don't want to go." Jonathan couldn't tell if he'd said it, or Scarecrow. It didn't matter.

"I know." They were hugging again, Bruce's hand running up and down his back. "But it'll help. I promise. And you won't be alone."

"I love you."

"Love you too." Then they were kissing, gently. Loving, not passionate. One for him, and one for Scarecrow, without Scarecrow having to ask.

Jonathan wasn't sure how he got out of the car. He didn't remember doing it, only pausing for a moment before he realized Bruce wasn't pulling away until he was out of sight. His legs didn't want to move, vision blurred with tears behind his glasses, but he forced himself, someone, the twenty or thirty yards to the gate and the space after that to the doors taking an eternity, but not long enough.

He almost collapsed when he stepped inside. The scent of ammonia and sanitizers and hopelessness was overwhelming, the sight of the familiar off-white, peeling paint making him want to scream. It was only the thought of Bruce and the lingering sensation of the kiss that kept him together, and even that was just barely. The nurse at the reception desk was one that had been there during his administration, though he couldn't remember her name. But her face, freckled and lined, and her hair, highlighted and blond and frizzy despite her efforts to keep it all pinned, was familiar. Jonathan couldn't decide if that was better or worse.

She was hanging up a phone when he approached, wiping his eyes for what had to be the nine hundredth time, and she didn't look up. "How may I help you?"

"By checking me back in." Jonathan managed to keep his voice steady, by some small miracle. She raised her head, and after a second of realization, her expression made it clear that she remembered him too. Though in her case, it was by name.


	99. Choice of Words

AN: One more thing I forgot to mention about _No Man's Land_: I had a laughing fit for a good ten minutes (which hurts rather a lot with stitches in the mouth) on the page with the map of Gotham, when I realized one of the districts in the city is called "Otisburg." Yes, I am a Superman geek as well.

Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

As if being back in Arkham wasn't bad enough, there just had to be an uproar over the fact that he'd come back of his own free will. All right, uproar was an exaggeration, but only just; Jonathan was fairly certain that absolutely every doctor and at least half the nurses employed in the institution had poked their head through the door of the infirmary where the check in process was held. Because having Joan Leland worry over all his new scars wasn't invasive enough without her shooing someone away every five seconds. He could only imagine what would happen when his friends were made aware of his presence. Jonathan had the feeling that would take more than admonishments to keep them out.

At least Joan had the decency not to question him on where he'd been, after the first time she'd asked and received an awkward silence in reply. She seemed the only one with the insightful enough to be happy that he'd come back at all—to his knowledge, not a single Arkham escapee before this had ever returned out of free will—and Jonathan found himself oddly grateful to her for that. He'd always resented Joan, the way she'd gone from an employee and a so-called friend to another of the idiots who pretended to be understanding in the hopes that he'd open up in their sessions. He'd never forgiven her for that week of heavy sedation after Harley had broken the Joker out, either. True, he'd thrown her desk lamp at her when she tried talking to him about it, but that was beside the point.

Besides, she'd been asking for it, leaving something so easily used as a weapon unsecured on her desk. He never would have allowed that if he'd still been running things. She was lucky he'd been the one to pick it up, and not someone who could actually inflict damage.

Still, she wasn't demanding answers and he supposed it was better going through this process with someone he knew—and used to tolerate enough to go on lunch breaks with—than some giggly intern or sadist of a doctor who wouldn't take silence for an answer. Arkham was hell on Earth, but not everyone who worked here was demonic. Just annoying. As Joan was quickly becoming, because she was apparently incapable of leaving the new scars he'd inflicted on his arm alone.

"Did you run out of medication?"

Did she have to keep running her hand over his arm like that?

_Push her._

_No. _What sort of a suggestion was that? _I'm not going to push a woman._

_But you'll expose them to toxin._

_That's different. Besides, Bruce wouldn't like that._

_Bruce isn't here._ Scarecrow sounded more like a sulky child than his understanding other half. Not that Jonathan could blame him.

_I happen to like Joan._

_I happen to have a problem with people who are trying to kill me._

Jonathan didn't answer that. He had no idea how to placate Scarecrow, especially considering that in all likelihood, his fears weren't irrational. But they couldn't get rid of him if Jonathan didn't want it. He knew enough about reintegration to know that it had to be willing. And he refused to let that happen.

_And if they drug you into submission?_

"Jonathan?"

"Yes," he muttered, pulling his arm away. It was immediately grabbed by the infirmary nurse, so she could impale him with a tetanus shot. Standard procedure for whenever they noticed he'd hacked himself up. He was beginning to hate needles. "I ran out."

Joan got that look that indicated she was intensely curious about something but too polite to start demanding answers. Wonderful. That brought the total number of questions he'd have to invent answers for or risk getting Bruce caught up to about twelve thousand and six. At least he'd have something to do in his spare time. "But…you got more?"

Jonathan made a point of not answering. She got the hint after a minute, thank God, and stepped back, silent, allowing the nurse to bother him with an oral thermometer before she spoke again. "Jonathan?"

He held in a sigh. "Yes?"

"I'm glad that you came back."

Scarecrow made a derisive sound and muttered something about how professionals ought to sound like professionals and not the glurgy writing inside of a Hallmark card. It occurred to Jonathan, at that moment, that this was not going to work. Not like this. He was going to have to make some kind of progress to get out of here, and that wasn't going to happen with Scarecrow arguing against everything everyone said, whether it was therapeutic in nature or not. It couldn't work, any more than the relationship with Bruce had worked before Scarecrow was on board. Which left one option. Another of those "do it now or forever lose your nerve" decisions.

_Don't. Don't you dare._

He tried to swallow, but his throat had gone to dry for that. _If they try to get rid of you, I'll break out. I promise._

_Bruce—_

_Will let us hide in the house forever, if we beg hard enough. That's better than losing you. And if they let you stay…I don't know. Maybe they can help us._

_Jonathan, I'm sc—_

"Joan?" He hadn't meant for his voice to break like that. Damn it.

She looked up from the legal pad she'd been written on, eyes wide and entirely too caring. "What is it, Jonathan?"

"T-there's." Jonathan paused, took a breath to steady himself. Scarecrow was shaking. Mentally, he embraced him, forced himself to continue. "There's something I need to tell you."

* * *

"Morning, Brucey." All right, so three in the afternoon could hardly be considered "morning," but if the Joker had come to call anytime before noon, he figured the chances would be very high that the Prince of Gotham had yet to leave the Royal Bedchamber, and if Jeeves had opened the door, the whole plan would have been ruined. And the Joker had taken so much time with his makeup today. Failure was not an option.

Brucey looked about how the Joker had expected he would upon opening the door to find the Clown Prince of Crime shoving a rose in his face: adorably bewildered. There was an amusing flicker of emotions across his face, his eyes wanting to go all wide and his brows all furrowed, but he wouldn't allow it, trying to tame his expression into something more intimidating. It was almost a shame that the Joker planned to destroy him. If he wasn't such a complete asshat and holding back the Batman, he'd be pretty fun for a spoiled playboy. "_Joker_."

"Don't growl when you're not in the cowl, Bruce. Give your vocal cords a rest." He waved the rose back and forth in Bruce's face, amused by the other's irritation when he refused to make things easy for himself and just take it. True, the Joker had forgotten to remove the thorns—things like that didn't really matter when one was a masochist and wearing gloves besides—but still, it was a _rose_, just as harmless by any other name. He wasn't Poison Ivy, after all. He couldn't biologically engineer the thing to release toxiny stuff when rich people held it. "I'm not here to maim anybody or blow anything up or, uh, come inside without wiping my feet."

Bruce's eyes flickered down to his plaster-encased legs before shooting back up, all piercing and suspicious and manly. It might have been intimidating had the Joker not pictured that same expression with his black Bat-paint around the eyes and started giggling. "Then what do you want?"

"Just to vis_it_, Mr. Inho_spit_able. I thought you might be lonely now that Jonny's back in the birdhouse." Lonely and vulnerable. Breaking a mind strong enough to conceive of his Batsy was going to be an involved process, and it wouldn't work unless he started when there were cracks in the armor. What better way to widen those cracks then by disorientation? A few visits and gifts that left his head spinning like a merry-go-round and Brucey would be, well, not wide open, but decidedly weaker about the fortress. Probably.

His eyes narrowed again. He didn't bother to ask how the Joker knew about Jonathan's incarceration, presumably because it had been breaking news since about four o'clock yesterday when somebody in Arkham or the GCPD had leaked the information to the press. Which was _fantastic_ timing, because the Joker had just been thinking about how he ought to pay his little kitten another visit that night. Jonathan had a knack for messing things up beautifully when left to his own devices, but he hadn't expected it to go as far as recommitting so fast. A fight, some impulsive sex, maybe. This was better than his wildest dreams. "And you thought I'd want to see _you_?"

The Joker placed his free hand over his heart, gasping as if struck. "That _hurts_, Brucey. That really does. Here I am, trying to comfort you when your loved one's gone all cuckoo's nest, and you lash out at me. Nice. Always said you had communi_ca_tion problems."

God, if he narrowed his eyes anymore, his whole face would look contorted. The Joker couldn't help but laugh at the thought that if Bruce slipped into the Bat voice now, it would be like some godawful yet hilarious Clint Eastwood impression. It wasn't until he was wiping tears and paint from his eyes that he decided it wasn't helping the conversation to giggle out of context. Mind fucking was serious business, and all that. "Sorry."

Bruce looked stuck between punching him—_yes yes yes do it_—or standing there gaping. Sadly but not unexpectedly, he chose the latter. "I am not in the mood to deal with you."

"Well, that's friendly."

"And what do you mean, my loved one?" He was in detective mode. So Jonny hadn't told him about the breaking and entering and relationship advice. The Joker had expected as much. Jonny could always be relied on to follow the Joker's orders regardless of personal risk or the state of their friendship. It made him smile.

He decided to play dumb. "Kitten told me. When I was here last."

Ooh, and now there were clenched teeth to go along with the slanty eyebrows. "What are you talking about?"

The Joker blinked slowly, with a look that was either perfectly confused or completely over the top. He couldn't tell without the aid of a mirror. His acting skills tended to fool people, but then, most of his henches were either halfwits or nut jobs, and most everyone else he encountered was either scared shitless or trying to analyze him. "I've been here like, three maybe four times since I jumped off yonder balcony, Bats." He gave a vague gesture toward the back of the manor, swinging the rose. "Deleted it off the cameras so your butler wouldn't get pissy, but I'd have thought Jonny mentioned me. We talked a _lot._ I'm the one who told him to go for it in the first place." A shrug. "Maybe he was still, uh, readjusting to the meds and forgot."

Brucey looked entirely too suspicious and not at all self-doubting, and the Joker began to wonder if it wouldn't be best just to distract him by grabbing him by the collar and laying one on him. Probably not the best idea he'd ever had, but certainly one of the most fun.

"Here." He shoved the rose in Bruce's face again. "I wanted you to have this as a reminder of my undying love in times of trouble."

His hand was not batted away, as he'd been hoping. "It's white."

"What are you, some sorta flower racist? It's a sign of love, take it." He rattled it again. Some of the petals began to droop. Lovely. The negativity around this manor was strong enough to kill plant life. Well, at least that boded well for the mind screwery.

"White roses represent purity, you idiot."

What _was_ it with everyone nitpicking the color of roses? First Jonny, then Brucey, and if he ever got roses for Harley, she'd probably start in with it too. One of the many reasons he hadn't, actually. Fuck it. After this he'd go with buttercups or daffodils or something else that only came in one color, and everyone could just shut up about the supposed meaning. "Right. 'Cause I wanna, uh, start over with a clean slate."

He snorted. That was a bad sign. "The hell you do."

The Joker pouted. Good thing he hadn't been expecting an apology, because none came. "Nice. I reach out to you, and that's the response?"

"You're not "reaching out." You're either scheming or being insane, and neither of them are endearing."

Try as he might to remain impassive, the Joker blinked. "You're a jerk, Bats."

"And you're a psychopathic murder. Get off my lawn." There was a note of warning in his voice which the Joker chose not to heed. Bruce Wayne's insults were only proving that he was hard to crack, and persistence was a necessary trait here.

"God. I can see how you drove Jonny off."

_That _had done it. He could all but see the veins pulsing in Bruce's eyes. It was glares like those that made it apparent this was the body that housed Batman. Yum."Shut up."

The Joker did not. "Touchy, _touchy._ Sorry, I'm sure you didn't scare him away. Didya decide it would be better for him in the long run, or did he go over the edge again and ya didn't have a choice?"

"Joker—"

"I mean, I'm sure your little, uh, fling will stay flingy even if he's in the madhouse. It's not even a long distance relationship, just a _near_ distance one with a partner under house arrest. I mean, you'd have to pay extra to get conjugal visits, but that's not ex_act_ly a problem for the Prince of Gotham, so yeah."

"_Joker_—"

"And so what if the gadflies get wind of it and there's a massive media backlash? I'm sure you've had worse scandals. Maybe. I mean, the city's most eligible bachelor going gay is gonna throw a lot of people off, but fuck 'em, right? A love like yours is gonna last, through all the pissy socialites and the doctors and the diagnoses and treatment for Stockholm Syndrome. Screw the dissenters. Of course, if by some crazy random happenstance things go, uh, awry, there are other, much more attractive villains with better taste in fashion who are here for you—"

He wasn't sure _which _part of that tirade pushed Brucey over the edge, but obviously some part of it had, because he was abruptly cut off by a fist to the mouth. He tasted blood. It was nice.

"Violence doesn't solve all your problems, Bats."

He was practically giving off steam. "If you say one more word about Jonathan—"

"Fine." He held up his hands in defense. It was obvious that this little _t__ete__-__á__-t__ete_ wasn't going to accomplish anything apart from pissing Brucey off, not today, so the Joker decided to screw it and cut to the pain. He deserved some payoff for tromping up the front walk on crutches, after all. "I'll shut up about your boytoy. Just, ah, one more thing, if you haven't figured it out yet and you get a chance while he's in the cotton box: Jonny gives _good_ head, for future refe—"

Another punch to the mouth, this one accompanied by an odd snapping sound, and then he felt himself falling backward as Bruce Wayne jumped on top of him, throwing punch after punch, and he was too busy laughing and swallowing blood and loving every second of it to care about the further damage this could do to his legs. At least, until he landed, and the pain was overwhelming for a second before everything went pleasantly dark.

* * *

It felt as if his head had been repeatedly smacked with a sledgehammer, bounced up and down on a sidewalk, and then jackhammered a few times for good measure. Christ on a bike. Had he even hit his head? He vaguely remembered falling—still too out of it to remember how or why—but it seemed to him that his legs had been the problem. When had he hit his head?

The Joker opened his eyes. Ow. Closing them again, he decided that daylight was most assuredly not something he wanted to expose himself to at the moment. Did that indicate a concussion? Joy. The events before the blackout came flooding back—just as painful as the sun had been—and he decided not to bring up Jonny's oral skills again. The blood that was still flowing in his own mouth was fun, but this "holy Zombie Jesus my brain's being tap danced on" sensation was _not. _At least his legs were only a bit sore. If he'd rebroken them, Bruce Wayne would have to die physically as well as mentally. And that wouldn't be fun for anyone.

The ground beneath him seemed to be vibrating, as it occurred to him that he was sitting up. The Joker risked opening his eyes again, slowly. It stung, but more striking than the pain was the fact that he was seatbelted and handcuffed. The vehicle was unmistakable even without looking up. "Taking me back to Arkham, Bats?"

No answer. Well, that was a yes. The Joker smirked. One would think, after all his escapes, that Batman of all people would realize Arkham completely failed as a prison or as a deterrent where the Clown Prince of Crime was concerned. True, the casts would be a hindrance, but if there was one thing the Joker was good at—apart from killing people and causing chaos—it was adaptation. He moved his tongue to lick his lips and stopped dead when it didn't encounter the usual obstacle on the way out.

"Bats?" Frantic, he ran his tongue back and forth again, over the spot where his front teeth ought to be, encountering only blood and gum. The same teeth Jonny had knocked out, last Halloween at Arkham, the ones the dentist he'd forced by threat of death to re-implant had warned him would be weaker after trauma. Shit. Shit shit _shit._ "Bats! My teeth!"

"You can worry about your oral hygiene in Akrham." Being restrained in the back of the Batmobile, the Joker could only see the back of the Batman's head, but his tone—he didn't even have the decency to use the Bat voice, damn him—made it evident that the bastard was smirking. "Though I think gingivitis is inevitable at this point."

The Joker found that he could kick the back of the driver's seat by angling his legs correctly and did, with no regard to the damage he could do to himself. "Where the hell are my teeth?!"

"If you mean the front ones, probably somewhere in my yard."

He'd forgotten by now the exact window of time he had to replace them before it was too late, but it wasn't long. "Turn the car around. Now!"

"Hate to break it to you, but the safety of the city is a little more important to me than your smile."

The Joker was almost too panicked to be outraged. Almost. "If I don't get this fixed _now_, they can't fix it _at_ _all._" The Bat made a strange sort of snerk sound, the noise a person made when he wanted to laugh his ass off but was trying to hold it in. "This isn't funny!"

"I'm going to have to disagree with you there. It's hilarious."

His breath was coming in shallow and fast and he couldn't seem to control it. "You son of a—"

"Did you know," Batman interrupted, "that you have a lisp without those teeth?"

The Joker stayed silent for the rest of the ride, fuming and plotting the Batman's death the entire way.

* * *

AN: My Joker is incredibly vain, if that somehow slipped your notice.

Buttercups represent childishness, and daffodils represent unrequited love.

Off to write the next chapter! Let's see if I can't get this finished before 2010.


	100. The Rules of Visitation

AN: Thanks for the reviews!

* * *

It had been seven days last night.

A week, back in Arkham. Seven days, seven nights, one hundred and sixty-eight hours, ten thousand and eight minutes, six hundred and four thousand, eight hundred seconds in the asylum. A week, without a glimpse of either of them, Batman or Bruce. And every day of that week made his hope slip that much more.

It hadn't been a bad week, by other standards. He hadn't had any troubles from the orderlies or the other patients, and his friends had been much more understanding in the "I Don't Want to Talk About It" department than he would have ever guessed, after a stern talk from Leland. Not that Isley hadn't grabbed him and demanded answers, but she'd calmed down once Nigma and Tetch pried her off. Even the therapy sessions hadn't been…well, they were still bad, as he hated therapy, but not nightmarish. And Joan had taken being told about Scarecrow surprisingly well.

Surprisingly being subjective, of course. It wasn't as if she said "Oh, you have another person in your head? Don't worry about that, honey, it's not important." It hadn't been the reaction he'd been searching for when he told her. Truth be told, he had no idea what reaction he had been hoping for. Only that it had seemed important to say, despite how much he didn't want to, if he wanted to make the sort of progress the asylum would accept as proof of a cure. They'd had too much bad publicity with the criminal inmates in the past. They weren't going to release him without intense scrutiny, and Jonathan had never been much of an actor.

No, Joan had gone all wide-eyed, biting her lips and looking as if she was restraining herself from speech while he explained. Jonathan couldn't say that he blamed her. It had to be shocking enough to find out that the man she'd worked with was experimenting on their patients, and weird enough that she ended up treating him. Certainly it was beyond uncomfortable on his side of the fence. And on top of all that, now he'd informed her that he'd had a second half that had been speaking to him his entire life, and could take control after the poisoning. A bit much to take in, to say the least.

Joan hadn't reacted with dismay, though, only worry, and he was grateful for that. She'd listened in silence, and had only asked one question once he was through. "So, does…Scarecrow want to participate in our sessions?"

_No._

He shook his head. "No. Not now, anyway."

Joan nodded, moved as if to hold his hand, but reconsidered and only patted it. "Thank you for sharing this with me, Jonathan."

Then she'd written something down for his file—presumably the voice in the head bit—and led him to his latest cell. She'd raised the subject of Scarecrow again in their first session the next day, yes, but only to ask if Jonathan would be comfortable talking about him. Not necessarily his birth, just their relationship in general.

He'd said yes. Sometimes that seemed like an innocent enough decision, and other times it made him break into a cold sweat, wondering if he hadn't opened the door for his best friend to be wiped away. Those were the sort of thoughts he tried to avoid.

It had been easier to avoid sinking into anxiety when he'd only been there for a day or two. Then he could remind himself that Bruce's butler had him technically housebound, and that he was injured besides—the sex, as Jonathan always found himself thinking with a blush, couldn't have been good for the stitches—but as the days went by he got the nagging sense that Bruce ought to have snuck out by now. Selfish, yes, but he couldn't help it. The thought of Batman's visits were the only thing that kept him going through most of the day, but the visits weren't happening.

"Jonathan?"

Someone's hand was stroking his hair. He followed the hand to the wrist, and up the arm to meet Harley's concerned expression. They were seated in the rec room, all of them, himself on the end of the couch, flanked by Isley on one side and Harley on the other, and herself beside the couch on top of the Joker.

The Joker had been returned to the asylum six days ago—by Batman, no less, couldn't Bruce have made some excuse to get inside and say hello?—and placed in a wheelchair, as the staff had wisely decided that giving him crutches would be asking for someone to be bludgeoned. Ordinarily, the Joker would have taken anything with wheels as an invitation for chaos, racing down the halls or colliding into orderlies and patients for the fun of it, but the Joker's temperament had changed drastically since Jonathan had last seen him. He refused to speak to anyone, even Harley, and wouldn't do so much as open his mouth. Jonathan had caught the clown glaring at him more times than he could count over the past week, looking as if he was bursting to say something but never getting around to it. He just sat, sulking, his fury incredibly evident without the paint to mask his features. Everyone, staff included, considered the silence a marked improvement. Everyone except Harley, of course.

She had spent the past six days never leaving his side unless she was forced to, hovering over him, hanging off him, or sitting on top of him, whenever she could maneuver her way into the chair. At first it was out of worry, trying to get him to tell her what had happened, or speak at all, or eat more. At some point, Harley had realized he wasn't going to answer no matter how much she persisted, and now Jonathan suspected she was clinging to him just because she liked the closeness.

Jonathan was busy being disturbed by what Bruce could possibly have done to shut the Joker up. Assuming it had been Batman to silence him. And not something else. Something worse, that Batman was up against now that he'd discovered it. God only knew what danger he could be putting himself in. Tears threatened to form in Jonathan's eyes and he blinked rapidly to dry them. "Yes, Harley?"

"What's wrong?" She hadn't stopped stroking his hair.

"I…it's nothing."

Someone was holding his opposite hand. Isley. "It's not nothing."

A sigh. Jonathan wondered just how badly they'd respond to "I'm in a relationship with the Batman and I'm anxious because he hasn't come to visit yet." Very badly, by his guess. The Joker was already glaring at him as if he wanted to tear his throat out. "No, it isn't. But it's…irrational, and there's nothing to be done about it."

Harley moved her hand from his hair to his face. "You can tell us anything, you know."

_No, I can't. _"Really. This is something I need to work out on my own."

She nodded and lowered her hand, though Isley still held his. "You can talk to me if you ever need to, okay?"

Jonathan barely had time to say yes before the Joker harrumphed loudly, his mouth still closed, and jerked the chair away so suddenly that Harley nearly fell off his lap, pushing himself out of the rec room. _What's his problem?_

_Who cares? _Scarecrow answered, and Jonathan was inclined to agree. _At least he's leaving us alone._

True, and life would be, well, not perfect, but good if Bruce wasn't doing the same thing. His mind went racing through the possibilities again. The Joker had somehow injured him—

_He couldn't have, _Scarecrow argued, though it sounded more perfunctory than assured. _He's the one who dropped the Joker off._

_Someone else injured him_—

_If he was bedridden, he'd have found a way to deliver a message. His butler may hate us, but he has the CEO, and he would have instructed one of them to tell us if anything bad happened._

_The butler won't let him see us, or he's stopping the messages—_

_The butler doesn't like us, but he wouldn't be that cruel. Not to Bruce. Probably._

_Scarecrow, what if he's tired of us?_

_He's _not. _Don't say that!_

Jonathan couldn't tell if Scarecrow was honestly convinced that Bruce wouldn't abandon them, or if he said it so harshly because he wanted to force himself to believe it. Sad, really, that he didn't know whether or not he was lying to himself. _I'm sorry._

_He'll be here. He has to be._

Maybe Scarecrow was right. There was no harm in hoping, apart from a broken heart, and he'd rather have that later than now. For all he knew, Bruce had a perfectly legitimate reason for his absence. After all, he was insanely busy without throwing a genuine love interest into the mix, between work, heroing, and socializing, all of which he was supposed to be banned from. But then, he'd broken that rule to bring the Joker back.

_Why won't he break it for me?_

No. That sort of thought would lead to nothing, apart from pain. And that couldn't be the reason. Even if Bruce had tired of him—which he hadn't, the thought was _insane_—he was a decent person. He would have told Jonathan if he'd decided to break things up. Or sent a letter, if he couldn't do it face to face. He wouldn't leave him hanging like this.

_Maybe he's trying to do this legitimately, _Scarecrow suggested. His voice sounded hopeful, but the hope sounded forced.

_What?_

_Maybe he's waiting a week because that's what you told him patients do, and he wants to follow the rules as closely as possible to help us adjust._

_So he'd be here tonight?_

_Maybe._

Jonathan considered it. It would be far too much of a risk to visit in the day, when there were doctors and nurses and orderlies and so many others to witness the interaction and raise questions about just how Bruce Wayne got to know Jonathan so well. But he still had a penchant for the rules…it made sense. _Maybe he is._ He leaned against Isley. She didn't question it, and he turned his head toward the window, waiting for the sun to go down. It was only eleven.

Arkham had once been the only place he'd felt at home, once he'd adjusted to his anger at the captivity. Now, for the first time since his incarceration after the League of Shadows, when he'd become lucid enough to recognize where he was, he wanted to go home again. Not to the apartment he'd lived in before the experiments had been found out, as he once pined for, but back to the mansion. To think that he'd been willing to slice at his own skin and go off the meds to get out of there, once upon a time.

It hadn't been bad, per se, being here, but he could hardly call it good. He hadn't spoken honestly and freely in a session since his time with Harley—and even that had been a result of the Joker's threats, at the beginning—and it was even more bizarre now. With Harley, he'd been speaking to a friend. He didn't know what the sessions with Joan were, whether she genuinely wanted to help him or if she was just trying to treat one of the super criminals, finally get one out, whether she respected his wish to keep Scarecrow around, or if she was trying to undermine their relationship bit by bit. It was terrifying, the worry through each session and afterwards, reviewing all that he'd said and wondering where he could have slipped up.

But the sessions themselves, apart from his fear, weren't bad. Just…talking. Not even about anything in particular, or anything serious. Not yet. Joan hadn't addressed where he'd been in his absence, or how he'd gotten the medication. They'd just talked.

He couldn't tell if that was good or bad. It was frightening, but part of him…part of him didn't hate it.

"Jonathan?"

For a second, he'd thought Isley had spoken, but when he raised his head to look at her, she met his eyes with a questioning glance. He looked forward, to find a nurse standing in front of the couch, young and new and looking entirely disconcerted. "Yes?"

"You have a visitor."

His heart seemed to stop for a moment, eyes widening and body going rigid. Isley had noticed, from what he could see of her in his peripheral vision, and Nigma shifted beside her, but he couldn't bring himself to care what his friends thought of this reaction. _Bruce. It's Bruce. He doesn't care about his reputation. _But it couldn't be. It was too much of a risk. True, the nurse looked wide-eyed and possibly star struck, but that could indicate a reporter, for all he knew, someone who'd managed to charm his way past security and flirt into getting a visit. There was no sense in getting his hopes up, only to be dashed. _Still…_

The door to the rec room opened.

Visitors met with patients in a different room, appropriately titled the visitation lounge, also populated with a television, couches, books, and the rest, but slightly smaller and further down the hall. They met in the lounge, the patient's room, or the cafeteria, and were allowed nowhere else—apart from the restrooms—without an employee escort. It was a policy Jonathan himself had enacted, after a woman visiting her husband had been groped by a patient and threatened a lawsuit. Walking into the rec room unescorted was absolutely not allowed.

Unless the person in question happened to be one of the few investors left at Arkham, and the most generous to boot.

Bruce Wayne stood in the doorway, looking polished and professional and entirely out of place. He scanned the room, stopping and breaking into a smile when his eyes reached the couch. Jonathan sat, unable to move. His friends beside him had noticed the intrusion, were speaking, asking him questions, but he didn't hear them. The nurse in front of him turned, began nervously, "Mr. Wayne, visitors really aren't supposed to—"

"Bruce." He was standing. He wasn't sure when that had happened. Maybe it had been Scarecrow's influence.

"Jonathan."

Jonathan was never quite sure, in the time after that first meeting, what excuses he had made to Joan and his friends for knowing Bruce Wayne, let alone being overjoyed at the sight of him and running across the room to throw himself into the Prince of Gotham's arms. It was a blur, as was the rest of the visit itself. The only clear memory he had of that first visit—though he calmed enough to remember the many, many other visitations once it was clear that he hadn't been abandoned—was the hug, and the quiet whispers of "I love you" into each other's ears before the others could get close enough to listen in. Bruce had held him, managing somehow to look calm and natural as he did, and it was his coolness that had saved them. Immediately after the initial shock had passed his friends circled around them, bewildered and questioning, but he didn't answer, not a word to anyone but his love until Bruce had gone. To be honest, he didn't even remember their words, only the sight of Bruce smiling and everyone else's confounded faces. It hadn't been important, because at that moment, Bruce was there, and Bruce was holding him, and that was the only thing that mattered in the world.

* * *

AN: The Joker's too concerned with losing his street cred per the missing teeth to pick on Jonny. Well, that and I'm sure Batsy threatened him with lots of "interfere with Jonathan's progress and I'll give up Batman forever" type nonsense.

I can't believe this fic is finally over, after the start all the way back in May. I've had a great time writing it, even if there were times I had to force myself when the motivation ran out, and I'd never have been able to motivate a hundred chapters onto this laptop if not for all the support I got in reviews, fan art, and PMs. Anyone who's read this far, regardless of reviews, has been a real supporter and you all deserve a thank you. I'm not being facetious when I say I wouldn't have made it without you, and thanks for all the feedback.

I do have another sequel planned to this, in the form of a one shot, but it won't be the next thing I write (though I will try to write it soon) as I've had another idea kicking around my head for several months now, just dying to get out. I'll start on the next fic as soon as possible, and I should warn you that **the next fic will be in a different continuity**, as in not tying in with the series I've been writing. It's also got the longest title of any of my fics, abbreviated as TDATNTAMS.

Happy New Year, everyone, and once again, thank you for reading!


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